Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Excessive and frequent evacuation of watery feces.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A morbidly frequent evacuation of the bowels, generally arising from inflammation or irritation of the mucous membrane of the intestines, and commonly caused by errors in regimen, as the use of food hurtful from its quantity or quality; intestinal catarrh.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Med.) A morbidly frequent and profuse discharge of loose or fluid evacuations from the intestines, without tenesmus; a purging or looseness of the bowels; a flux.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A condition in which the sufferer has frequent and watery bowel movements.
  • noun The watery excrement that comes from said bowel movements.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun frequent and watery bowel movements; can be a symptom of infection or food poisoning or colitis or a gastrointestinal tumor

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English diaria, from Medieval Latin, from Late Latin diarrhoea, from Greek diarroia, from diarrein, to flow through : dia-, dia- + rhein, to flow, run; see sreu- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek διάρροια ("through-flowing"), from διά (dia, "through") + ῥέω (rheō, "flow").

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Comments

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  • beautiful sounding word with aweful connotation

    October 23, 2008