Apoplectic

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˌæp.əˈplɛk.tɪk/

Definitions

  1. Feeling or showing intense, enraged anger ; connected to or affected by a sudden loss of consciousness due to cerebral hemorrhage or stroke
  2. Experiencing a furious and uncontrollable rage ; pertaining to or symptomatic of apoplexy, a condition involving sudden paralysis or loss of sensation
  3. Marked by overwhelming fury or rage ; characteristic of or caused by a stroke or similar brain event leading to paralysis

Etymology: To the ancient Greeks, a man who suddenly dropped senseless, unable to speak or move, had been struck. Not by anything visible: the verb "apoplēssein", built from "apo" (off, away) and "plēssein" (to strike), meant to knock someone down or stun them, and "apoplēktos" described a person struck senseless. Greek physicians in the Hippocratic tradition took the image into medicine as "apoplexia", the seizure that fells a person without warning. They judged it grim: a severe attack, they wrote, was impossible to cure, and even a mild one was not easy to cure. The same root runs through the medical vocabulary of paralysis. "Plēssein" gave "plēgē", a blow, which lives on in "paraplegia" and "hemiplegia", each a body struck in part. Latin borrowed the vocabulary of apoplexy, and Late Latin formed "apoplēcticus" from the Greek adjective "apoplēktikos". French made it "apoplectique", and English took the adjective from French in the early seventeenth century. The noun had arrived much earlier: Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale praises a poor widow whose plain diet spared her head from "poplexie". English already had a homegrown version of the same idea. By around 1600 a sudden collapse was also called a "stroke", short for a stroke of God's hand, so the native word and the Greek one told the same story of an invisible blow. The modern sense of rage grew out of how the condition was understood. Under humoral medicine, the classic victim was a heavy, florid, hot-blooded man, and a fit of fury was thought capable of bringing on the fatal attack. A man purple with anger looked like a man about to be struck down. By the nineteenth century, "apoplectic" could describe someone spluttering with outrage, with no stroke involved at all.

Synonyms: furious, enraged, irate, incensed, indignant

Antonyms: calm, composed, peaceful, untroubled, serene