phlegmatic

UK/flɛɡˈmætɪk/US/flɛɡˈmætɪk/

adjectiveC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Phlegmatic means calm and hard to stir up. A phlegmatic temperament.

It comes from the four humours, where phlegm was supposed to make a person cool and slow. Phlegmatic is mild praise now, though it began as a diagnosis of sluggishness.

Definitions of phlegmatic

1adjectivephlegmaticCalm and hard to stir up.C2
“He was phlegmatic about losing the whole thing.”

phlegmatic is a quality.

Where it comes from

Greek phlegmatikos, from phlegma, one of the four bodily humours of ancient medicine.

Ancient Greek
φλεγματικός
Latin
phlegmaticus
Old French
fleumatique
Middle English
fleumatik
English, today
phlegmatic

From Middle English fleumatik, flewmatik, flematik, fleumatyke, flewmatyk, from Old French fleumatique, from Latin phlegmaticus, from Ancient Greek φλεγματικός, from φλέγμα, referring to the humour which ancient Hippocratic and later Galenic medicine associated with mildness, coldness, sluggishness, and indifference. Spelling later altered to resemble the word's Latin and Greek roots, with modern pronunciation following this new spelling.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

phlegmatic in the wild

The four temperament theory is a proto-psychological theory which suggests that there are four fundamental personality types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.
Four temperaments
La Survivance is an expression used by French Canadians denoting the phlegmatic survival of francophone culture, typically in the face of Canadian anglophone or Anglo-American hegemony.
La Survivance
As indicated in the subtitle, each of its four movements is a musical sketch of a humor of the four temperaments: choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine.
Symphony No. 2 (Nielsen)
The term is derived from the word phlegmatic, meaning 'not easily excited'.
Phlegmatizer
While Hill's characters were agile and youthful, Spencer always played the "phlegmatic, grumpy strong-arm man with a blessed, naive child's laughter and a golden heart".
Terence Hill and Bud Spencer

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.

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