Chronic

How to spell chronic

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chronic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chronic mean?

1. adjectiveLasting for a long time or recurring constantly, especially of an illness or persistent problem.
2. adjectiveIn informal British use, very bad or of poor quality.

Chronic in a sentence

• Years of poor posture left her with chronic back pain.

• The traffic on the motorway this morning was absolutely chronic.

• The department faces a chronic shortage of trained staff.

• The acting in that film was chronic, and most of the audience left early.

Where does chronic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Chronic traces back to the Greek word chronos, which simply meant 'time'. From it the Greeks formed chronikos, meaning 'concerning time' or 'lasting through time', and that passed into Latin as chronicus. English picked it up in the late 1500s by way of French chronique, first in medical writing to describe an illness that drags on over a long period rather than flaring up briefly. The same Greek chronos root sits inside everyday relatives such as 'chronicle', 'chronology', and 'synchronise', and it explains the spelling trap: the word opens with 'ch' pronounced as a hard k, a fingerprint that Greek-derived words carry. Over time the sense broadened from medicine into general use for anything persistent or habitual, and in British speech it also drifted into an informal term for something very bad.

How the word is built

• chron (from Greek chronos: time)
• -ic (adjective suffix)