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dementia

nounattested in dialogue

  • //dɪˈmɛnʃə//

A progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Areas particularly affected include memory, attention, judgement, language and problem solving.

noun

  1. 1

    A progressive decline in cognitive function due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Areas particularly affected include memory, attention, judgement, language and problem solving.

    Similar studies of rats have employed four different intracranial resorbable, slow sustained release systems— […]. Such a slow-release device containing angiogenic factors could be placed on the pia mater covering the cerebral cortex and tested in persons with senile dementia in long term studies.

    In recent years some clinical trials involving potential dementia drugs have had disappointing setbacks.

  2. 2

    Madness or insanity.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *de Proto-Indo-European *-h₁ Proto-Indo-European *déh₁ Proto-Italic *dē Latin dē Latin dē- Proto-Indo-European *men- Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Indo-European *méntis Proto-Italic *mentis Latin mēns Latin dēment- Proto-Indo-European *-(i)yós Proto-Italic *-ijos Proto-Italic *-ios Old Latin -ios Latin -ius Latin -ia Latin dēmentiabor. English dementia Borrowed from Latin dēmentia.

Forms

plural
dementias, dementiae
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).