diagnose
verb
Simple meaning
To determine which disease is causing a sick person's signs and symptoms.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dyuhgnohsSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
daɪəɡˈnoʊs
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
verb
transitivemedicine
To determine which disease is causing a sick person's signs and symptoms; to find the diagnosis.
Determine or distinguish the nature of a problem or an illness through a diagnostic analysis
by extension
To determine the cause of a problem.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: To determine which disease is causing a sick person's signs and symptoms; to find the diagnosis.
Used this way, diagnose is a specialist word with a clearly unfavourable pull. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Clinical and detached
Where it naturally appears
- Medicine/healthcare
- Science
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use diagnose
- “The doctor will diagnose the problem after reviewing your symptoms.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
Identifying the nature or cause of some phenomenon.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- meningitisnoun
- diagnosticadjective
- biopsynoun
- symptomnoun
- tomographynoun
- clinicallyadverb
- patientnoun
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.