intensive care
noun
Simple meaning
The support and monitoring of critically ill patients.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
ihntehnsihvkerSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ɪnˈtɛnsɪvkɛɹ
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.
noun
medicine
The support and monitoring of critically ill patients, especially by the use of instrumentation and specialized staff and equipment.
medicinecolloquial
A part of a hospital into which critically ill patients, in danger of dying, are admitted and closely monitored.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: The support and monitoring of critically ill patients, especially by the use of instrumentation and specialized staff and equipment.
Used this way, intensive care 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.
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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.