Morbidity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The frequency or rate at which illness occurs in a population ; the condition or quality of being affected by disease or poor health
2. How often diseases or medical problems appear in a group ; the unhealthy state of suffering from illness or medical issues
3. The measure of disease occurrence among people ; the state of having a disease or being unhealthy in general

Etymology: Morbidity is a fairly plain formation: the adjective "morbid" with the suffix "-ity" added, which turns an adjective into a noun meaning a state or quality. The adjective itself came into English from Latin "morbidus," meaning "diseased," which grew out of "morbus," "disease." That Latin noun is usually traced to the same root that gives us words for dying, though a competing proposal links it to an older Indo-European root meaning "to rub" or "wear away," a sense that fits the slow wasting of illness. The noun first appears in the record in 1721, and its earliest sense was the one still used in medicine and public health: the rate at which illness occurs within a group of people. The broader sense of simply being affected by disease or poor health developed from that statistical meaning. The word's use in clinical and epidemiological writing, where it is measured as a proportion of a population, is what gives it its precise, almost numerical feel today.

Synonyms: illness, disease, sickness, ailment, pathology

Antonyms: health, wellness, fitness, vitality, robustness