Word.ws English Dictionary

tetani

tetani is the plural of tetanus.

Meaning of tetanus

Noun

tetanus (usually uncountable, plural tetani or tetanuses)

  1. (usually) A serious and often fatal disease caused by the infection of an open wound with the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium tetani, found in soil and the intestines and faeces of animals.
    • Compared to 290 children with TQQ negative, CWDs were significantly less likely to receive antenatal care (P=0.003), to get a maternal tetanus shot during antenatal care (P=0.004) and to receive full vaccination (P=0.01).2012, Yoshito Kawakatsu, Satoshi Kaneko, Mohamed Karama, Sumihisa Honda, “Prevalence and risk factors of neurological impairment among children aged 6-9 years: from population based cross sectional...
    Synonyms:
    lockjaw
  2. (countable, usually) A state of muscle tension caused by sustained contraction arising from a rapid series of nerve impulses which do not allow the muscle to relax.
    • We first saturated LTP in one pathway by applying repetitive tetani that had no effect on the control pathway […]1998 January 16, Pierre-Marie Lledo et al., “Postsynaptic Membrane Fusion and Long-Term Potentiation”, in Science, volume 279, number 5349, →DOI, pages 399–403

Questions about tetani

What is tetani the plural of?
Tetani is the plural of tetanus.

Words near tetani in the dictionary

  1. tet
  2. tet spell
  3. tet spells
  4. Teta
  5. tetanal
  6. tetani
  7. tetanic
  8. tetanically
  9. tetanics
  10. tetanies
  11. tetaniform

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tetani (page history and authors); tetanus (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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Cite this entry: “tetani.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tetani. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.