Morbid

How to spell morbid

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce morbid

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does morbid mean?

1. adjectiveShowing an unhealthy or excessive interest in unpleasant subjects, especially death and disease.
2. adjectiveRelating to or caused by disease; characteristic of an unhealthy bodily condition.

Morbid in a sentence

• He has a morbid curiosity about old murder cases.

• The pathologist examined the morbid tissue under the microscope.

• The documentary dwelt on the disaster in morbid detail.

• Obesity is associated with several morbid conditions of the heart.

Where does morbid come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin morbidus, meaning 'diseased' or 'sickly', which was built on the noun morbus, the ordinary Latin word for a disease or ailment. That noun is thought to connect with mori, 'to die', the same root that gives us 'mortal' and 'mortuary', which is why the whole family carries an air of sickness and death. English adopted morbid in the seventeenth century, at first strictly as a medical term describing the diseased state of a body or tissue. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the sense broadened from the physical to the mental, so that a 'morbid' mind was one unhealthily fixated on gloom, decay, and dying. The spelling stays close to its Latin parent, keeping the single b and the -id ending that signals an adjective, which makes it less of a trap than many borrowings.

How the word is built

• morb- (from Latin morbus: disease)
• -id (adjective suffix meaning 'tending toward')