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Cabot Cove syndrome

Cabot Cove syndrome noun: the situation where, in order to create storylines for a detective drama, the protagonist encounters far more murders than is plausible.

Noun

Cabot Cove syndrome (uncountable)

  1. (humorous) The situation where, in order to create storylines for a detective drama, the protagonist encounters far more murders than is plausible.
    • If an author cannot figure out some credible way to introduce murder into an amateur sleuth's life, the writer risks creating a detective who suffers from the dreaded Cabot Cove syndrome […]2012, John Charles, Candace Clark, Joanne Hamilton-Selway, The Readers' Advisory Guide to Mystery, page 20

Origin of Cabot Cove syndrome

Named from the fictional setting of the long-running US television series Murder, She Wrote.

Questions about Cabot Cove syndrome

What does Cabot Cove syndrome mean?
Cabot Cove syndrome means the situation where, in order to create storylines for a detective drama, the protagonist encounters far more murders than is plausible.
What part of speech is Cabot Cove syndrome?
Cabot Cove syndrome is a noun.

Words near Cabot Cove syndrome in the dictionary

  1. caboshing
  2. cabossed
  3. cabosside
  4. cabossides
  5. Cabot
  6. Cabot Cove syndrome
  7. Cabot's tern
  8. cabotage
  9. cabotages
  10. cabotegravir
  11. cabotinage

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Cabot Cove syndrome (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Cabot Cove syndrome.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cabot_cove_syndrome. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.