What does "medicalese" mean?

The jargon used by medical professionals.

Medicalese

Q: What is a synonym for "medicalese"?

Common synonyms include: doctorese, doctorspeak, federalese, journalese, officialese, pentagonese.

noun, slang

noun, slang ·Uncommon ·College level

Definitions

Noun

1
The jargon used by medical professionals. informal, uncountable
"Masters and Johnson wanted their work to be taken seriously, and wanted to stay a step ahead of the morality police, so they tended to write in almost comically dense medicalese."

Synonyms

All synonyms

doctorese doctorspeak federalese journalese officialese pentagonese

Example

More examples

"Masters and Johnson wanted their work to be taken seriously, and wanted to stay a step ahead of the morality police, so they tended to write in almost comically dense medicalese."

Etymology

From medical + -ese.

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