Sickness

//ˈsɪknɪs// noun

noun ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The quality or state of being sick or diseased; illness. uncountable, usually

    "I do lament the sickness of the king."

  2. 2
    impairment of normal physiological function affecting part or all of an organism wordnet
  3. 3
    Nausea; qualmishness; as, sickness of stomach. uncountable, usually
  4. 4
    the state that precedes vomiting wordnet
  5. 5
    The analogical misuse of a rarer or marked grammatical case in the place of a more common or unmarked case. uncountable, usually

    "We can now return to the question of how we treat the phenomenon of dative sickness (the possibility of substituting dative in place of accusative on the experiencer nominal) in Icelandic."

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  1. 6
    defectiveness or unsoundness wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
illnessdiseaseillnessmaladyunsoundnessnausea

Example

More examples

"There has been a lot of sickness in my family this winter."

Etymology

From Middle English sikness, from Old English sēocnes. By surface analysis, sick + -ness.

Related phrases

African horse sicknessAfrican sleeping sicknessJamaican vomiting sicknessNuminbah horse sicknessPicardy sweating sicknessacute mountain sicknessaltitude sicknessbleeding sicknessbottle-sicknessbush sicknesscar sicknessclaw sickness

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