Dyslexia
//dɪsˈlɛk.si.ə// noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A learning disability characterized by reading and writing difficulties. countable, uncountable
- 2 impaired ability to learn to read wordnet
Synonyms
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More examples"Tom struggled with dyslexia as a child."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from French dyslexie and/or German Dyslexie, coined by German ophthalmologist Rudolf Berlin in 1887, from dys- + lexis + -ia, from Ancient Greek δυσ- (dus-) + λέξις (léxis, “diction”, “word”), from Ancient Greek λέγω (légō, “to speak”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leg- (“to collect, gather; to speak”). The term was coined with λέξις (léxis) being taken to mean "reading," likely due to semantic conflation of Greek λέγω (légō, “to speak”) and Latin legō (“to read”). By surface analysis, dys + lex(is) + -ia.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.