Word.ws English Dictionary

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)

  1. 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 presentretrodiagnoses
present participleretrodiagnosing
past participleretrodiagnosed
pastretrodiagnosed

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

  1. retrodeformation
  2. retrodeformations
  3. retrodeformed
  4. retrodeforming
  5. retrodeforms
  6. retrodiagnose
  7. retrodiagnosed
  8. retrodiagnoses
  9. retrodiagnosing
  10. retrodialysed
  11. retrodialysis

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.

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