sickness
noun
Simple meaning
Being sick or diseased.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
siknuhsSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈsɪknəs
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
The quality or state of being sick or diseased; illness.
Nausea; qualmishness; as, sickness of stomach.
linguistics
The analogical misuse of a rarer or marked grammatical case in the place of a more common or unmarked case.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Formality
- Technical
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The quality or state of being sick or diseased; illness.
Used this way, sickness is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It turns up most in medicine or healthcare contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Medicine/healthcare
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Money paid (by the government) to someone who is too ill to work.
Motion sickness experienced while traveling in a car.
Pain resulting from rapid change in pressure.
Disease of livestock and especially cattle poisoned by eating certain kinds of snakeroot.
Nausea early in the day.
Nausea and shortness of breath experienced by mountain climbers above ten thousand feet.
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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.