VITUS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

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

1. Christian martyr and patron of those who suffer from epilepsy and Sydenham's chorea (died around 300)

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

• VITUS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Christian martyr and patron of those who suffer from epilepsy and Sydenham's chorea (died around 300)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

St. Vitus; Vitus

Instance hypernyms:

martyr (one who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty for refusing to renounce their religion)

saint (a person who has died and has been declared a saint by canonization)

 Context examples 

She judged it to be a form of St. Vitus's dance, and she feared the extent to which its ravages might go.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

He pushed his face forward as he spoke and his lips and eyelids were continually twitching like a man with St. Vitus’s dance.

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

Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it, had at one time an excellent general practice; but his age, and an affliction of the nature of St. Vitus’s dance from which he suffered, had very much thinned it.

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