Word of the Day:
rachitic
What It Means
Of or pertaining to, or affected by, rickets (“a disorder of infancy and early childhood due to a deficiency of vitamin D, causing soft or weak bones”).
In a precarious or weak condition; likely to break down or collapse; feeble, rickety.
Rachitic in Context
“His companions—now I could see them as well. […] Tiny, nocturnal, twittering, they were like rachitic children, and as one went past me I saw mongoloid features and a bald head.”
Did You Know?
From rachitis (“rickets”) + -ic (suffix forming adjectives from nouns with the sense ‘of or pertaining to’), possibly modelled after French rachitique or Late Latin rachiticus. Rachitis is an unadapted borrowing from New Latin rachitis, used by the British physician Francis Glisson (1597–1677) to refer to rickets, from Koine Greek ῥαχῖτις (rhakhîtis) (in ῥαχῖτις νόσος (rhakhîtis nósos, “spinal inflammation”, literally “spinal disease”)), the feminine form of ῥαχίτης (rhakhítēs, “in or of the spine, spinal”), from Ancient Greek ῥάχῐς (rhákhĭs, “lower part of the back; (anatomy) backbone, spine”) (probably ultimately Pre-Greek) + -ῖτις (-îtis) (feminine form of -ῑ́της (-ī́tēs, suffix forming nouns with the sense ‘one connected to’)). By surface analysis, rach- + -itic.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rachitic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “rachitic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rachitic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
