pandemic

²pan·dem·ic

noun \pan-ˈde-mik\

Definition of PANDEMIC

: an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population : a pandemic outbreak of a disease

Examples of PANDEMIC

1. The 1918 flu pandemic claimed millions of lives.
2. … globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism. —Martin Filler, New York Review of Books, 24 Sept. 2009
3. … it also hopes to utilize this cultural investigation to better understand strategies to reduce the massive pandemic we now understand cigarette smoking to produce. —Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century, 2007
4. There is evidence that this gambling pandemic is going global. —Gerri Hirshey, New York Times Magazine, 17 July 1994
5. In ten years that it raged, this pandemic took or ravaged the lives of nearly five million people before it disappeared, as mysteriously and suddenly as it had arrived, in 1927. —Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, 1973

Origin of PANDEMIC

(see ¹pandemic)

First Known Use: circa 1853

Other Medicine Terms

analgesia, angina, diabetes, hepatitis, homeopathy, logorrhea, palliate

Rhymes with PANDEMIC

endemic, systemic