retrodiagnose
retrodiagnose verb: to retroactively diagnose a dead person with a medical or psychological condition.
Verb
retrodiagnose (third-person singular simple present retrodiagnoses, present participle retrodiagnosing, simple past and past participle retrodiagnosed)
- To retroactively diagnose a dead person with a medical or psychological condition.
- Rather than retrodiagnosing colonial patients through glimpses and gaps in their stories—was this one a paranoid schizophrenic? did that one suffer major depressive psychosis? was a third borderline?— […]2007, Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa, The University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 85
- It's still really important in medicine, of course, but now you can do anthropology with genetics, or retrodiagnose famous historical figures, or even do genetics-based origami and computing.2012, Sam Kean, The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code, Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN
Forms of retrodiagnose
| third-person singular present | retrodiagnoses |
|---|---|
| present participle | retrodiagnosing |
| past participle | retrodiagnosed |
| past | retrodiagnosed |
Origin of retrodiagnose
From retro- + diagnose.
Questions about retrodiagnose
- What does retrodiagnose mean?
- Retrodiagnose means to retroactively diagnose a dead person with a medical or psychological condition.
- What part of speech is retrodiagnose?
- Retrodiagnose is a verb.
- What is the past tense of retrodiagnose?
- The past tense of retrodiagnose is retrodiagnosed.
Words near retrodiagnose in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: retrodiagnose (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:
Cite this entry: “retrodiagnose.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/retrodiagnose. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
