clientitis
clientitis noun: the situation where an organization's resident in-country staff come to regard the officials and people of the host country as "clients", and thus lose touch with the norms and aims of their home country.
Noun
clientitis (uncountable)
- The situation where an organization's resident in-country staff come to regard the officials and people of the host country as "clients", and thus lose touch with the norms and aims of their home country.
- Their relationship with the governments in their region is usually one of warmth and understanding, often described as “clientitis” or “clientism.”1990, Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina's Dirty War Against Human Rights and the United Nations, University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN
- We also learned two new words: “clientitis” and “ambassadoritis”. Clientitis is the disease of those enthralled by a host country that they promote its interests, rather than their own country's.2009, Vera Blinken, Donald M. Blinken, Vera and the Ambassador, State University of New York Press, →ISBN, page 58
Synonyms of clientitis
Origin of clientitis
From client + -itis.
Questions about clientitis
- What does clientitis mean?
- Clientitis means the situation where an organization's resident in-country staff come to regard the officials and people of the host country as "clients", and thus lose touch with the norms and aims of their home country.
- What part of speech is clientitis?
- Clientitis is a noun.
Words near clientitis in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: clientitis (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-clientitis.wav.
Cite this entry: “clientitis.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/clientitis. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.