Pathological

How to spell pathological

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce pathological

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pathological mean?

1. adjectiveSo extreme, habitual, or irrational that it resembles a mental illness.
2. adjectiveRelating to disease, or to the medical study and diagnosis of disease.

Pathological in a sentence

• His pathological need to control every meeting wore the team down.

• The biopsy revealed clear pathological changes in the tissue.

• She described him as a pathological liar who could not stop inventing stories.

• The report listed several pathological findings for the lab to review.

Where does pathological come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek pathos, meaning 'suffering' or 'feeling', the same root that gives us 'sympathy' and 'pathos' in the dramatic sense. The Greeks paired it with logos, meaning 'study' or 'account', to describe the systematic study of disease, which entered learned Latin and then European languages as 'pathology'. The adjective 'pathological' was formed to mean 'relating to that study of disease' and was in scholarly use in English by the 1600s. From the strict medical meaning it later broadened, by the nineteenth century, into the loose everyday sense of behaviour that is so extreme it seems like a sickness, as in a pathological liar. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the 'patho-' opening keeps the 'th' and the silent feel of the second 'o', and the ending is the regular '-ical' rather than '-ological' split, so it helps to picture the parent word 'pathology' first.

How the word is built

• patho- (from Greek pathos: suffering, disease)
• log (from logos: study, account)
• -ical (adjective suffix)