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Allin

malpractice

nounattested in dialogue

The improper treatment of a patient by a physician that results in injury or loss.

noun

  1. 1

    The improper treatment of a patient by a physician that results in injury or loss.

  2. 2

    Improper or unethical conduct by a professional or official person.

    When such a breakdown occurs there must be a full examination of the corruption that has been committed, and the leaders involved in malpractices must be encouraged to give a full account of what took place.

    A national-security budget where we spend 20 times as much money on the military and intelligence agencies as we do on diplomacy, democracy promotion, and smart power, is foreign-policy malpractice in the modern world.

    “It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)mel-? Proto-Italic *malos Latin malus Latin maleder. Old French mal- English mal- ▲ Middle English practice, practise, practize, practyseder. Middle English practice, practique, practyse English practice English malpractice From mal- + practice.

Forms

plural
malpractices
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).