Acusia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A medical condition in which a person loses some or all of the ability to perceive sound
2. The partial or total absence of hearing, a form of deafness recognized in clinical settings
3. Impairment or failure of the sense of hearing, leaving a person unable to perceive sounds normally

Etymology: Acusia is built from Greek roots: the prefix "a-", meaning "without", and "akousis", meaning "hearing", which comes from "akouein", "to hear". The same pattern gives "anosmia" (loss of smell) and "aphasia" (loss of speech), so acusia belongs to a family of medical terms that name a lost sense by negating its Greek word. The term is a modern coinage. Physicians in the 19th and 20th centuries took classical Greek elements and assembled new technical names for conditions that the ancient Greeks themselves never described under this label. Its use is confined to clinical and scientific writing, where it names total, rather than partial, loss of hearing.