http://roque.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] roque.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] 1word1day2009-02-08 04:01 pm

February 7, 2009 - calenture

calenture
[ kal uhn cher, -choor ]
noun, sometimes intransitive verb

Definition, noun:
1) [Dictionary.com] Pathology. a violent fever with delirium, affecting persons in the tropics.
2) [American Heritage Dictionary] A tropical fever once believed to be caused by the heat.
3) [Med.] A name formerly given to various fevers occurring in tropics; esp. to a form of furious delirium accompanied by fever, among sailors, which sometimes led the affected person to imagine the sea to be a green field, and to throw himself into it.

Definition, v.i.:
To see as in the delirium of one affected with calenture. [Poetic]
Hath fed on pageants floating through the air Or calentures in depths of limpid flood. --Wordsworth.

Etymology:
[ Spanish calentura, from calentar, to heat, from Latin calēns, calent-, present participle of calēre, to be warm. ]

Example:
There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in extacy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a field. --Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare"

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