¹pandemic

adjective pan·dem·ic \pan-ˈde-mik\

Definition of PANDEMIC

: occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the population <pandemic malaria>

See pandemic defined for kids

Origin of PANDEMIC

Late Latin pandemus, from Greek pandēmos of all the people, from pan- + dēmos people — more at demagogue

First Known Use: 1666

Other Medicine Terms

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

Rhymes with PANDEMIC

endemic, polemic, sachemic, systemic, totemic

²pandemic

noun pan·dem·ic \pan-ˈde-mik\

medical : an occurrence in which a disease spreads very quickly and affects a large number of people over a wide area or throughout the world

Full 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

See pandemic defined for English-language learners

Examples of PANDEMIC

… 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
… 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
There is evidence that this gambling pandemic is going global. —Gerri Hirshey, New York Times Magazine, 17 July 1994
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
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