Word.ws English Dictionary

rheumatoid

rheumatoid adjective: involving or pertaining to rheumatism, especially rheumatoid arthritis.

Adjective

rheumatoid (not generally comparable, comparative more rheumatoid, superlative most rheumatoid)

  1. (not comparable, usually) Involving or pertaining to rheumatism, especially rheumatoid arthritis.
    • Rheumatoid sufferers have such pain and discomfort every day of their lives that they live eternally in high hopes of something effective turning up.1976 March 27, F. Dudley Hart, “History of the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis”, in British Medical Journal, volume 1, number 6012, →DOI, →JSTOR, page 763
    • Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (JRA), often referred to by doctors today as juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), is a type of arthritis that causes joint inflammation and stiffness for more than six weeks in a child aged 16 or younger. It affects approximately 50,000 children in the United States....2024 September 6, David Zelman, “Understanding Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis -- the Basics”, in WebMD
  2. (dated, not comparable, usually) Presenting analogies with rheumatism.

Noun

rheumatoid (plural rheumatoids)

  1. (dated) A person with rheumatoid arthritis.
    • The highly significant findings with regard to hurt feelings suggests that the hypothesis that rheumatoids learn to hide their hurt feelings [7] and are reticent about expressing their dissatisfactions [4] may be correct.1965 December, Sidney Cobb, Stanislav V. Kasl, Edith Chen, Roger Christenfeld, “Some psychological and social characteristics of patients hospitalized for rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, and...

Forms of rheumatoid

Adjective
comparativemore rheumatoid
superlativemost rheumatoid
Noun
pluralrheumatoids

Origin of rheumatoid

From rheumat(ism) + -oid.

Words formed from rheumatoid

Phrases with rheumatoid

Questions about rheumatoid

What does rheumatoid mean?
Rheumatoid means involving or pertaining to rheumatism, especially rheumatoid arthritis.
What part of speech is rheumatoid?
Rheumatoid can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near rheumatoid in the dictionary

  1. rheumatize
  2. rheumatized
  3. rheumatizes
  4. rheumatogenic
  5. rheumatogenicity
  6. rheumatoid
  7. rheumatoid arthritides
  8. rheumatoid arthritis
  9. rheumatoid factor
  10. rheumatoid factors
  11. rheumatoid pneumoconiosis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rheumatoid (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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