Word of the Day Archive
Tuesday February 24, 2004
recrudescent \ree-kroo-DES-uhnt\ , adjective:
Breaking out again after temporary abatement or suppression; as, a recrudescent epidemic.
Now they are recrudescent like other old maladies we thought we had eliminated.
-- Marilynne Robinson, "The way we work, the way we live", Christian Century, September 9, 1998
Imagining the prospect of a recrudescent Marxist revolutionary movement, the State Police became politicised in a way reminiscent of the 1919-22 period.
-- Richard Oliver Collin, "Italy: A Tale of Two Police Forces", History Today, September 1999
At the end of a six- to eight-month treatment regimen, only about half the first cohort of prisoners were declared cured -- and some of these later developed signs of recrudescent disease.
-- Paul Farmer, "TB Superbugs: The Coming Plague on All our Houses", Natural History, April 1999
Recrudescent derives from the present participle of Latin recrudescere, "to bleed again, hence to break out again," from re-, "again" + crudescere, from crudus, "bleeding, raw."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for recrudescent
