Word.ws English Dictionary

sick man of Europe

sick man of Europe proper noun: the Ottoman Empire.

Proper noun

sick man of Europe

  1. (archaic) The Ottoman Empire.
  2. Any European country undergoing economic difficulty.
    • Yes, we were known as the “sick man of Europe” until we joined the European Union and – guess what – we have left the EU and have regained that dubious status.2022 November 27, William Keegan, “Brexit has made Britain the sick man of Europe again”, in The Guardian

Origin of sick man of Europe

Calque of Russian больно́й челове́к Европы (bolʹnój čelovék Jevropy), a phrase coined by Czar Nicholas I of the Empire of Russia, referring to the poor state of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

Words formed from sick man of Europe

Questions about sick man of Europe

What does sick man of Europe mean?
Sick man of Europe means the Ottoman Empire.
What part of speech is sick man of Europe?
Sick man of Europe is a proper noun.

Words near sick man of Europe in the dictionary

  1. sick lists
  2. sick lit
  3. sick man
  4. sick man of Asia
  5. sick man of East Asia
  6. sick man of Europe
  7. sick men
  8. sick note
  9. sick notes
  10. sick nurse
  11. sick nurses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sick man of Europe (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-sick man of Europe.wav.

Cite this entry: “sick man of Europe.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sick_man_of_europe. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.