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feverish

UK/ˈfiː.və.ɹɪʃ/US/ˈfi.vɚ.ɪʃ/
adjectiveB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,747 of 15,258leans spoken

Feverish means hot with fever, or restlessly excited. Feel feverish, feverish activity, a feverish night.

The medical sense is literal and the other is a metaphor of the same heat: feverish activity is fast, unfocused and slightly desperate. Feverish speculation is what markets do before something breaks, and the word chooses itself in that phrase.

CDC · Public domain

Definitions of feverish

  1. 1adjectivefeverishHot with fever, or restlessly excited.B2

    “The child was feverish all night, so we called the doctor in the morning.”

feverish is a state.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *dʰegʷʰ- — to burn

  2. Latin

    febris — a fever

  3. Old French

    fievre — fever

  4. Old English

    fefer

  5. Middle English

    fever

  6. English

    fever

  7. English, today

    feverish

Built from

  • fefor · Old English — fever

From fever + -ish. fever comes from Middle English fever, fevere, from Old English fefer, fefor (“fever”) and Old French fievre (“fever”), from Latin febris (“a fever”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”). Displaced native Old English hriþ (“fever”). Compare also stq Fiewer, German Fieber, Danish feber, Swedish feber.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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feverish in the wild

  • Internally, it has been used for weak pulse, vegetable poisons (shoot), feverish colds, pneumonia, croup, heart conditions, and cardiac arrest.

    Aconitum anthora

  • The game was played at a feverish pace and lasted a mere 51 minutes, a major league record that still stands as the shortest nine-inning game ever played.

    Jesse Barnes

  • A diamond rush is a period of feverish migration of workers to an area where diamonds were newly discovered.

    Diamond rush

  • Robert Charles Bell believes the game to date from after 1789, following the French Revolutionary Wars, "a period of feverish political activity with factions conspiring against each other".

    Conspirateurs

  • In his feverish dreams, Kooky comes to life in the landfill, escapes into a mysterious forest and begins its journey amongst the rough-and-ready creatures of the forest.

    Kooky

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the fefer family

fever

feverish — used about once every 5,163 pages · #9,747 · point at the bar for the others