vertigo
Pluralvertigos (some meanings), vertigoes (some meanings)
- 1Dizziness caused by inner ear disease or by looking down from a great height, with a sense of spinning and a loss of balance.
An inner-ear infection left her with vertigo for several days.
Climbers sometimes feel vertigo when they glance down from a sheer cliff face.
Similardizziness, giddiness, light-headedness
Note
The bodily sense, borrowed whole from Latin vertīgō. What it names is a false feeling of spinning: the balance system of the inner ear, or the nerve pathways behind it, misreports where the body is in space. It works as a mass noun (she suffers from vertigo) and as a count noun (recurring vertigos), and the plural may be spelled either vertigos or vertigoes.
- 2A disordered or unbalanced state of mind resembling physical dizziness: a feeling of mental giddiness.
The rapid pace of change left the whole nation in a state of moral vertigo.
He felt a vertigo of doubt as his old certainties collapsed one by one.
Similardisorientation, giddiness, dizziness, confusion
Oppositeequilibrium, stability, certainty
- 3
- 4A minute land snail of the genus Vertigo, typically bearing a tightly coiled, whorled shell.
Researchers identified the specimen as a vertigo by its tightly coiled shell.
The damp limestone wall sheltered a vertigo no larger than a sesame seed.
Note
Here the word is a zoologist's name, not a sensation. Capitalized, Vertigo is the genus itself; lowercase, a vertigo is any single snail belonging to it, and several are vertigos or vertigoes. The capital matters in writing, since "a vertigo on the wall" means a tiny snail, while "vertigo" with no article usually means the dizziness.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from the Latin word "vertīgō".