INFIRMITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does infirmity mean? 

• INFIRMITY (noun)
  The noun INFIRMITY has 1 sense:

1. the state of being weak in health or body (especially from old age)

  Familiarity information: INFIRMITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• INFIRMITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The state of being weak in health or body (especially from old age)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

debility; feebleness; frailness; frailty; infirmity; valetudinarianism

Hypernyms ("infirmity" is a kind of...):

softness; unfitness (poor physical condition; being out of shape or out of condition (as from a life of ease and luxury))

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "infirmity"):

asthenia; astheny (an abnormal loss of strength)

cachexia; cachexy; wasting (any general reduction in vitality and strength of body and mind resulting from a debilitating chronic disease)

Derivation:

infirm (lacking bodily or muscular strength or vitality)

 Context examples 

Did not you hear him complain of the rheumatism? and is not that the commonest infirmity of declining life?

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

And to bear with my infirmities, Jane: to overlook my deficiencies.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Perjury, oppression, subornation, fraud, pandarism, and the like infirmities, were among the most excusable arts they had to mention; and for these I gave, as it was reasonable, great allowance.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

We have been unfortunate, and recent events have drawn us from that everyday tranquillity befitting my years and infirmities.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

About five ft. seven in. in height; strongly built, sallow complexion, black hair, a little bald in the centre, bushy, black side-whiskers and moustache; tinted glasses, slight infirmity of speech.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Refers to a person's state of physical, mental and social well-being; usually it refers specifically to the state of being in good health, a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and does not consist only of the absence of disease or infirmity.

(Health, NCI Thesaurus)

She murmured, however, even in her reception of me, that she was out of her own chamber because its aspect was unsuited to her infirmity; and with her stately look repelled the least suspicion of the truth.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

She went once with Jo, but the old gentleman, not being aware of her infirmity, stared at her so hard from under his heavy eyebrows, and said Hey! so loud, that he frightened her so much her 'feet chattered on the floor', she never told her mother, and she ran away, declaring she would never go there any more, not even for the dear piano.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

When is a man to be safe from such wit, if age and infirmity will not protect him?

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

It was mournful, indeed, to witness the subjugation of that vigorous spirit to a corporeal infirmity.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)