diabetes
- 1A group of metabolic diseases marked by high blood sugar, caused by the body's inability to produce or properly use the hormone insulin.
The clinic screens older patients for diabetes during routine checkups.
Type 2 diabetes is often managed with diet, exercise, and medication.
Note
The name goes back through Latin to a Greek word for a siphon, from a verb meaning "to pass through". It pictures fluid running straight through the body. Its full clinical name is diabetes mellitus, which keeps it distinct from the disorder of excessive urine. In use it usually carries a type number, as in type 2 diabetes, and people are said to live with it. Sustained high blood glucose damages blood vessels, nerves, kidneys and the retina.
- 2A condition marked by the passing of large volumes of dilute urine, typically caused by impaired production of or response to the antidiuretic hormone vasopressin.
Doctors suspected diabetes after the patient reported drinking and urinating excessively despite normal blood sugar.
Head trauma can trigger diabetes when the gland that releases vasopressin is damaged.
Note
Here the siphon image behind the word is literal: a body that lets water run straight through it. Nicholas Culpeper, in 1649, explains it as "continuall pissing". In Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle (1751), a lady "laboured under a Diabetes", written with an article, as any such complaint once was. Medicine now narrows it to failures involving vasopressin and calls it diabetes insipidus, setting it apart from diabetes mellitus.
- 3A humorous slang name for food or drink containing an excessive amount of sugar.
She handed me a soda the size of my head and called it liquid diabetes.
The dessert menu here is just diabetes with extra steps.
Note
Joking hyperbole treats a single sugary treat as if it could bring on the metabolic disease by itself. It works as a mass noun after a verb of being, often with an intensifier such as pure or liquid: this milkshake is pure diabetes. It is slang meant for laughs among friends. Because it borrows a serious illness for the joke, it can land badly around someone who actually lives with that illness.
Practice
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Origin
From Latin diabētēs ("siphon"), which came from Ancient Greek diabḗtēs, ultimately from the Greek verb diabaínō ("to pass through").