Retrodiagnose

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To retroactively diagnose a dead person with a medical or psychological condition.

    "Rather than retrodiagnosing colonial patients through glimpses and gaps in their stories—was this one a paranoid schizophrenic? did that one suffer major depressive psychosis? was a third borderline?— […]"

Example

More examples

"Rather than retrodiagnosing colonial patients through glimpses and gaps in their stories—was this one a paranoid schizophrenic? did that one suffer major depressive psychosis? was a third borderline?— […]"

Etymology

From retro- + diagnose.

More for "retrodiagnose"

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