Maniac

How to spell maniac

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce maniac

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does maniac mean?

1. nounA person who behaves in a wildly reckless, frenzied, or dangerously irrational way.

Maniac in a sentence

• The driver overtook on a blind bend like a complete maniac.

• He attacked the email backlog like a maniac, clearing two hundred messages before lunch.

Where does maniac come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the ancient Greek mania, meaning 'madness' or 'frenzied excitement', which was linked to mainesthai, the verb 'to be mad' or 'to rage'. From mania the Greeks formed maniakos, describing someone gripped by such frenzy, and this passed into Late Latin as maniacus. English took it up through French in the 1600s, at first as an adjective and soon as a noun for a raving or violently disordered person. Over time the sense softened in casual use, so that today a maniac can simply be someone wildly enthusiastic or reckless, as in a fitness maniac or a maniac behind the wheel. The same mania root survives openly in words like 'manic' and in clinical terms such as 'kleptomania', and remembering that shared mani- helps fix the spelling: it ends in -ac, not the more familiar -ic.

How the word is built

• mani- (from Greek mania: madness, frenzy)
• -ac (suffix: a person affected by or characterised by)