symptom
Pluralsymptoms
- 1A change in function, sensation, or appearance that a person feels and that points to a disease or disorder, such as fever, headache, or rash.
Like smoke that signals a fire you cannot yet see.
Loss of taste became a common symptom during the pandemic.
Doctors look beyond a single symptom to understand the whole illness.
Similarsign, indication
Note
Clinical English draws a careful line here. A symptom is what the patient feels and reports, such as a headache. A sign is what an observer can detect. The word comes from Greek sumptōma, "a happening, accident," built from roots meaning "fall together": something that befalls you. It usually takes of, and it reaches past illness itself, as in the classic symptoms of pregnancy.
- 2A sign or indication of the presence of something else, especially something undesirable.
Like the tip of an iceberg hinting at the much larger mass below the surface.
Rising crime is often a symptom of deeper social problems.
The argument was just a symptom of tensions that had been building for months.
Similarsign, indication, manifestation, mark
Note
The figurative use keeps medicine's habit of reading surface trouble as evidence of a hidden cause: a symptom of moral decay, typical symptoms of a doomed marriage. Outside the clinic, the strict split in the medical sense dissolves. Charles Zastrow's Introduction to Social Work and Social Welfare (2009) calls the same thing both a sign of family breakdown and a symptom of moral decay. What it points to is usually something wrong.
Practice
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Origin
From Ancient Greek σύμπτωμα (súmptōma), meaning "a happening, accident, or symptom of disease." This came from συμπίπτω (sumpíptō, "I befall"), formed from συν- (sun-, "together") plus πίπτω (píptō, "I fall").