Hysteria

Quick meaning: Hysteria is a noun meaning Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotions, in a wide range from joy to panic but usually including anxiety or fear.

Meaning

Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotions, in a wide range from joy to panic but usually including anxiety or fear.

More Meanings

1. (medicine, nosologically dated) A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc. without an organic cause.
2. (informal, psychopathology) Synonym of conversion disorder.
3. (psychiatry, until early 20th century, now historical) Any disorder of women with some psychiatric symptoms without other diagnosis, ascribed to uterine influences on the female body, lack of pregnancy, or lack of sex.

Example Sentences

At the very end of the Middle Ages, Breughel depicted country folk wrapped up in fits of mass hysteria, and the historical accounts of these rural frenzies have explained the delirium in terms of the slender diet on which the poor had to subsist during the hungry gap.

Word Forms

• hysterias
• hysteriae

Synonyms for hysteria

Depending on context, synonyms include frenzy, delirium, craze, fury.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include frenzy, fury, craze, delirium, psychosis, uproar.

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