Skip to content
OneKitly

anesthetic

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • //ˌænəsˈθɛtɪk//
  • //ˌænəsˈtɛtɪk//

Causing anesthesia; reducing pain sensitivity.

adjective

  1. 1

    Causing anesthesia; reducing pain sensitivity.

  2. 2

    Insensate: unable to feel, or unconscious.

    (I find that he is analgesic and anaesthetic; evidently he is in a state of passive somnambulism.) E. A. Did you feel anybody touch you? K. No. There's no one near me. (He continues laughing and talking. […])

    Though physically capable of attaining sex rewards, he is anesthetic; though capable of aggression, he is meek; though capable of affection, he is cold and unresponsive.

    He is anesthetic to their theological and political enthusiasms. He finds himself an alien at their feasts of soul.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Hellenic *ə- Ancient Greek ᾰ̓- (ă-) Ancient Greek ἀν- (an-)der. English an- Proto-Indo-European *h₂ew- Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- Proto-Indo-European *h₂ewis-dʰh₁ Proto-Hellenic *awistʰomai Ancient Greek αἰσθάνομαι (aisthánomai) Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Hellenic *-tis Ancient Greek -τις (-tis) Ancient Greek -σῐς (-sĭs) Ancient Greek αἴσθησῐς (aísthēsĭs) Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Hellenic *-kos Ancient Greek -κός (-kós) Ancient Greek -ῐκός (-ĭkós) Ancient Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthētikós)bor. Latin aesthēticusder. German Ästhetikder. ▲ New Latin aesthēticusbor. French esthétiqueder. English aesthetic English esthetic English anesthetic From an- + esthetic, or Latinized form of Ancient Greek ἀναίσθητος (anaísthētos, “insensible”) + -ic, from ἀν- (an-, “un-”) + αἰσθητικός (aisthētikós, “perceptible”).

noun

  1. 1

    A substance administered to reduce the perception of pain or to induce numbness for surgery and may render the recipient unconscious.

    After a local anesthetic is applied to the eye, do not rub or wipe the eye until the anesthetic has worn off and feeling in the eye returns.

    Modern anesthetics can be divided into several different groups according to how and where they act to reduce pain. During premedication, the anesthetist may give a patient drugs that make him or her feel relaxed and drowsy before the actual general anesthetic is administered.

Forms

plural
anesthetics
comparative
more anesthetic
superlative
most anesthetic
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).