TYPHUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does typhus mean? 

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

1. rickettsial disease transmitted by body lice and characterized by skin rash and high fever

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• TYPHUS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Rickettsial disease transmitted by body lice and characterized by skin rash and high fever

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

typhus; typhus fever

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

rickettsial disease; rickettsiosis (infectious disease caused by ticks or mites or body lice infected with rickettsial bacteria)

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

endemic typhus; murine typhus; rat typhus; urban typhus (acute infection caused by rickettsia and transmitted by the bite of an infected flea; characterized by fever and chills and muscle aches and a rash)

 Context examples 

I wrote to him; I said I was sorry for his disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead: she had died of typhus fever at Lowood.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

DDT was once widely used as a pesticide to control insects in agriculture and to control malaria, typhus and body lice, but its use is now limited.

(Chlorophenothane, NCI Thesaurus)

She was not, I was told, in the hospital portion of the house with the fever patients; for her complaint was consumption, not typhus: and by consumption I, in my ignorance, understood something mild, which time and care would be sure to alleviate.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood, it gradually disappeared from thence; but not till its virulence and the number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot's communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent: that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)