imperial disease
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.13 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
15
Letters
5
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A disease that arises from colonial exploration and causes significant harm to an empire, especially the British Empire.
noun
A communicable disease that is spread to indigenous people by conquering imperial forces.
Example Sentences
- "He served with distinction in both the South African War and the Great War, and during the last eight years he was Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, whose concern is with “Imperial diseases,” as he called them, as well as the more domestic."
- "More insidious than malaria in its general manifestations, ankylostomiasis did not, at first, attract public attention, and it is feared that even now the leading classes do not quite realise its social and economical importance — yet, reviewing the disease in Health Problems of the Empire, the late Sir Andrew Balfour writes : — " Ankylostomiasis is perhaps the Imperial disease par excellence, for even Malaria does not, day in and day out, produce such heavy economic loss "."
- "One should not think that the French won any final victory over "imperial diseases" in this era. A variety of respiratory illnesses, yellow fever, dysentery, and above all, malaria still killed regularly."
- "...in July 1807 we may discern the growth of a singular British imperial disease: Russophobia."
- "The basic administrative and judicial framework, however, was that of the Instructions to the Economic Administration (or ekonomicheskii ustav) which suffered from the usual Russian imperial disease: over-bureaucratization and mistrust of local authorities."
- "Certainly both superpowers suffer from the imperial diseases once so noteworthy among the Romans, the British and the French: arrogance and myopia."