diagnostic
adjective · noun
Simple meaning
Serving to indicate or specify a particular item or thing within a group of similar things.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dyuhgnahstikSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
daɪəɡˈnɑstɪk
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.
adjective
Concerned with diagnosis; used for furthering diagnosis
Of, or relating to diagnosis.
Serving to indicate or specify a particular item or thing within a group of similar things.
noun
Any technique used in medical diagnosis.
That by which anything is known; a symptom.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A2 · Elementary (estimated)
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Concerned with diagnosis; used for furthering diagnosis
Used this way, diagnostic is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
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 diagnostic
- “A diagnostic reading test.”adjective
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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.
The branch of medical science dealing with the classification of disease.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A procedure followed in making a medical diagnosis.
A program that recognizes and explains faults in the equipment or mistakes in a computer program.
A procedure followed in making a medical diagnosis.
An assay conducted for diagnostic purposes.
An assay conducted for diagnostic purposes.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- therapeuticadjective
- radiologynoun
- diagnosticsnoun
- biopsynoun
- diagnoseverb
- tomographynoun
- cardiologynoun
- pathologynoun
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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.