Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

sclerosis

UK/skləˈɹəʊ.sɪs/US/skləˈɹoʊ.sɪs/
nounC12 meaningsVery rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Sclerosis is a hardening of tissue inside the body. Healthy tissue turns stiff and scarred, and stops doing its job.

You will meet it most often inside a name. Multiple sclerosis is the disease in which the coating around the nerves hardens into patches and the signals between brain and body break up; it is usually shortened to MS. Atherosclerosis is the hardening of the arteries. Outside medicine, writers use sclerosis for institutions gone rigid — the sclerosis of a bureaucracy that can no longer change. The adjective sclerotic is the form a newspaper is likeliest to reach for.

Definitions of sclerosis

  1. 1nounsclerosisAn abnormal hardening of body tissue.C1

    “Multiple sclerosis attacks the covering of the nerves.”

    technical in this meaning — an editor’s judgement

  2. 2nounrigidityRigidity in an organisation that can no longer adapt.C2

    “The report described a sclerosis at the heart of the department.”

Where it comes from

Sclerosis is a hardening. Greek sklēros meant hard and sklērōsis the process of becoming so, which is why the word serves for tissue and for an institution alike.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *(s)kelh₁-

  2. Ancient Greek

    σκλήρωσις — hardening

  3. English, today

    sclerosis

Built from

  • σκληρόω · Ancient Greek — to harden
  • σκληρός · Ancient Greek — hard

From Ancient Greek σκλήρωσις (“hardening”), from σκληρόω (“to harden”), from σκληρός (“hard”); by surface analysis, sclero- + -osis.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 25 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word