Deletery

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Causing harm or damage to living things or to something else, an older form of the word meaning injurious
2. Having a harmful or destructive effect, especially on health, and now mostly found in older writing
3. Tending to injure or hurt, a term used in earlier English for something that does damage

Etymology: "Deletery" is a rare, almost obsolete English adjective meaning harmful or destructive, and it reached English by a route that bypassed the more familiar "deleterious." Both words descend from the same Ancient Greek adjective, "dēlētḗrios," which meant "destructive" or "noxious," derived from the verb "dēleomai," to injure or destroy. Scholars of the early modern period, working in Latin, reshaped that Greek into the New Latin form "dēlētērius," and English took it from there. The result is a true doublet: two English words sprung from one Greek source by separate paths. "Deleterious" came in by way of the Latin-derived scientific vocabulary, and "deletery" followed the more direct New Latin line. The Oxford English Dictionary records "deletery" as both an adjective and a noun, though the adjective is the form most often met in older writing.