Word.ws English Dictionary

summit fever

summit fever noun: the compulsion to reach the summit of a mountain at all costs.

Noun

summit fever (uncountable)

  1. The compulsion to reach the summit of a mountain at all costs.
    • Now that we were so close on Kilimanjaro, summit fever was taking me again.2010, Daniel Dorr, Kissing Kilimanjaro:Leaving it All on Top of Africa, →ISBN
  2. (broadly, figuratively) The obsessive urge to complete a task.
    • We suffer from summit fever. We push just a little harder, hoping we can rest when we get to the top. When we postpone an oasis until our to-do list is finished or until we've answered all of the 193 emails in our in-box, then we have summit fever.2004, Steve Donahue, Shifting Sands: A Guidebook for Crossing the Deserts of Change, →ISBN

Questions about summit fever

What does summit fever mean?
Summit fever means the compulsion to reach the summit of a mountain at all costs.
What part of speech is summit fever?
Summit fever is a noun.

Words near summit fever in the dictionary

  1. summists
  2. summit
  3. Summit County
  4. summit disease
  5. summit diseases
  6. summit fever
  7. summit tunnel
  8. summit tunnels
  9. summit-hop
  10. summit-hopped
  11. summit-hopper

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: summit fever (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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