Semihysterical
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Somewhat or partly hysterical. not-comparable
"The next four hours passed in a kind of dream. There was a long and semihysterical discussion following Brown’s confirmation, or maybe the discussion wasn’t as long as it seemed; maybe it was just the grim necessity of people chewing over the same information, trying to see it from every possible point of view, working it the way a dog works a bone, trying to get at the marrow."
Example
More examples"The next four hours passed in a kind of dream. There was a long and semihysterical discussion following Brown’s confirmation, or maybe the discussion wasn’t as long as it seemed; maybe it was just the grim necessity of people chewing over the same information, trying to see it from every possible point of view, working it the way a dog works a bone, trying to get at the marrow."
Etymology
From semi- + hysterical.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.