Maldevelopment

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The state of an organism or an organisation that did not develop in the "normal" way (used in medicine, e.g. "brain maldevelopment of a fetus").
  2. 2
    Under the philosophy of sustainable development, poor economic, human or social development.

Etymology

From French maldéveloppement, introduced as a human and social development term in France in the 1990s, to replace the words malformation or développement anormal. The word can be broken down as mal- (“ill”) + development.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.