Word.ws English Dictionary

symphoric

symphoric adjective: clumsy; accident-prone.

Adjective

symphoric (comparative more symphoric, superlative most symphoric)

  1. (archaic, rare) Clumsy; accident-prone.
    • Who would have endured in this place to have seen two such words as the phthano-paranomic or crime-preventing, and the phthano-symphoric or calamity-preventing, branches of the police?1789, Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
    • Walk a mile in my snowshoes, I say, before you deal thus harshly with a poor, unfortunate symphoric nyctalopian, come at the dwindling twilight of his life to a state of repentance and hiatus hernia. Ah, you nullifidians, you!1989, Harlan Ellison, Harlan Ellison's Watching, →ISBN
  2. Relating to or involving symphoria (any sense).
    • Both the symphoric (integrational) phase of the metaphysical, namely ‘mediation’ (cf. ⑥ and ?⃝) and our intermodal triad, termed ‘module’, derive from templates as ancient as the fundamental PH-PX asymmetry and the fundamental PX-SZ asymmetry. All of metaphysics is ultimately aimed at mediating...1983, Manfred Faust, Roland Harweg, Werner Lehfeldt, Götz Wienold, editors, Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Textlinguistik: Festschrift für Peter Hartmann
    • Senn’s paper on “Symphoric Joyce” queried where the pun begins and ends and noted the “symphoric” quality of Joyce’s writing—bringing various nodes of signification together in the text.1998 April 1, Donald Theall, “Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication”, in Canadian Journal of Communication, volume 23, number 4, →DOI

Forms of symphoric

comparativemore symphoric
superlativemost symphoric

Origin of symphoric

From Ancient Greek συμφορά (sumphorá, “mishap, mischance, misfortune”)?

Questions about symphoric

What does symphoric mean?
Symphoric means clumsy; accident-prone.
What part of speech is symphoric?
Symphoric is an adjective.

Words near symphoric in the dictionary

  1. symphony orchestra
  2. symphony orchestras
  3. symphonygoer
  4. symphonygoers
  5. symphoria
  6. symphoric
  7. symphorol
  8. symphorols
  9. symphorophilia
  10. symphronistic
  11. symphylan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: symphoric (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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