Word.ws English Dictionary

misthanasia

misthanasia noun: the premature death of a vulnerable human due to a failure to provide appropriate help in the context of social injustice.

Noun

misthanasia (uncountable)

  1. The premature death of a vulnerable human due to a failure to provide appropriate help in the context of social injustice.
    • Orthotanasia refers to the art of promoting a humane and correct death, not subjecting patients to misthanasia or dysthanasia and not abbreviating death either, that is, subjecting them to euthanasia.2009 September/October, Chaiane Amorim Biondo, Maria Júlia Paes da Silva, Lígia Maria Dal Secco, “Dysthanasia, Euthanasia, Orthotanasia: The Perceptions of Nurses Working in Intensive Care Units and...
    • In these scenarios a debate on the difficult task of maintaining a balance between disthanasia, (therapeutic obstinacy), misthanasia (patient abandonment) and medical futility was seen (9-12)2010, José Ramírez Rivera, Carlos Cánova Díaz, Robert Hunter Mellado, “Knowledge and implementation of the DNR in internal medicine teaching programs”, in Puerto Rico health sciences, volume 29...

Origin of misthanasia

A neologism coined by Brazilian bioethicists, from mis- (“badly, wrongly”) + -thanasia (as in euthanasia, dysthanasia), from Ancient Greek θάνατος (thánatos, “death”).

Questions about misthanasia

What does misthanasia mean?
Misthanasia means the premature death of a vulnerable human due to a failure to provide appropriate help in the context of social injustice.
What part of speech is misthanasia?
Misthanasia is a noun.

Words near misthanasia in the dictionary

  1. mistflowers
  2. mistfly
  3. mistfrog
  4. mistfrogs
  5. mistful
  6. misthanasia
  7. misthank
  8. misthanked
  9. misthanking
  10. misthanks
  11. mistheist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: misthanasia (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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