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Kuru disease

Kuru disease noun: a rare, fatal prion disease of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, causing progressive neurological decline and historically transmitted through mortuary endocannibalism.

Noun

Kuru disease (uncountable)

  1. A rare, fatal prion disease of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, causing progressive neurological decline and historically transmitted through mortuary endocannibalism.

Origin of Kuru disease

From Fore kúru (literally “trembling, shivering”). Perhaps eventually from Proto-Gorokan *kút(V) (“dangling, shaking”) if cognate with the reduplicated element of Yagaria gúli gúli hu- (“be loose, rattle”).

Questions about Kuru disease

What does Kuru disease mean?
Kuru disease means a rare, fatal prion disease of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, causing progressive neurological decline and historically transmitted through mortuary endocannibalism.
What part of speech is Kuru disease?
Kuru disease is a noun.

Words near Kuru disease in the dictionary

  1. Kurtzian
  2. Kurtzman
  3. Kurtzmans
  4. Kurtöp
  5. kuru
  6. Kuru disease
  7. Kuruba
  8. Kurubas
  9. kuruc
  10. kurucs
  11. Kurudu

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Kuru disease (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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