Word.ws English Dictionary

maldevelopment

maldevelopment noun: the state of an organism or an organisation that did not develop in the "normal" way (used in medicine, e.g. "brain maldevelopment of a fetus").

Noun

maldevelopment (plural maldevelopments)

  1. The state of an organism or an organisation that did not develop in the "normal" way (used in medicine, e.g. "brain maldevelopment of a fetus").
  2. Under the philosophy of sustainable development, poor economic, human or social development.

Forms of maldevelopment

pluralmaldevelopments

Origin of maldevelopment

From French maldéveloppement, introduced as a human and social development term in France in the 1990s, to replace the words malformation or développement anormal. The word can be broken down as mal- (“ill”) + development.

Questions about maldevelopment

What does maldevelopment mean?
Maldevelopment means the state of an organism or an organisation that did not develop in the "normal" way (used in medicine, e.g. "brain maldevelopment of a fetus").
What part of speech is maldevelopment?
Maldevelopment is a noun.
What is the plural of maldevelopment?
The plural of maldevelopment is maldevelopments.

Words near maldevelopment in the dictionary

  1. malder
  2. maldescended
  3. maldescent
  4. maldest
  5. maldeveloped
  6. maldevelopment
  7. maldevelopments
  8. MALDI
  9. maldifferentiation
  10. maldigest
  11. maldigested

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: maldevelopment (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: “maldevelopment.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/maldevelopment. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.