Library / English Dictionary

RHEUMATISM

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Any painful disorder of the joints or muscles or connective tissues

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Hypernyms ("rheumatism" is a kind of...):

disease (an impairment of health or a condition of abnormal functioning)

Derivation:

rheumatic (of or pertaining to arthritis)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A chronic autoimmune disease with inflammation of the joints and marked deformities; something (possibly a virus) triggers an attack on the synovium by the immune system, which releases cytokines that stimulate an inflammatory reaction that can lead to the destruction of all components of the joint

Synonyms:

atrophic arthritis; rheumatism; rheumatoid arthritis

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Hypernyms ("rheumatism" is a kind of...):

arthritis (inflammation of a joint or joints)

autoimmune disease; autoimmune disorder (any of a large group of diseases characterized by abnormal functioning of the immune system that causes your immune system to produce antibodies against your own tissues)

Domain category:

virus ((virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "rheumatism"):

psoriatic arthritis (a form of rheumatoid arthritis usually affecting fingers and toes and associated with psoriasis)

juvenile rheumatoid arthritis; Still's disease (a form of rheumatoid arthritis that affects children; large joints become inflamed and bone growth may be retarded)

Derivation:

rheumatic (of or pertaining to arthritis)

Credits

 Context examples: 

There they crouched by the fire, the pair of them, at the end of their days, old and withered and helpless, racked by rheumatism, bitten by hunger, and tantalized by the frying-odors of my abundance of meat.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

I thought we should never have got through them, though we had the four horses of course; and poor old coachman would attend us, out of his great love and kindness, though he was hardly able to sit the box on account of the rheumatism which I had been doctoring him for ever since Michaelmas.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

But he talked of flannel waistcoats, said Marianne; and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old and the feeble.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)