Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The branch of medicine that deals with the classification of diseases.
  • noun A classification of diseases.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A systematic arrangement or classification of diseases; that branch of medical science which treats of the classification of diseases.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A systematic arrangement, or classification, of diseases.
  • noun That branch of medical science which treats of diseases, or of the classification of diseases.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A treatise or written classification of diseases.
  • noun The study of diseases; the systematic investigation or classification of disease.
  • noun The characteristics or scientific understanding of a specific disease.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the branch of medical science dealing with the classification of disease

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From post-classical Latin nosologia, formed as from Greek νόσος ‘disease’ + -λογία ‘discourse, branch of knowledge’.

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Examples

  • He will surely die; and of a disease that answers no description in nosology (194).

    Grave Dirt, Dried Toads, and the Blood of a Black Cat: How Aldridge Worked His Charms 2002

  • "anomaly," and who taught that, though an anomaly may constitute a predisposition to disease, the study of anomalies -- pathology, as he called it, teratology as we may perhaps prefer to call it -- is not the study of disease, which he termed nosology; the study of the abnormal is perfectly distinct from the study of the morbid.

    Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 Sexual Inversion Havelock Ellis 1899

  • Indeed, the bad name that proverbially hangs the dog has already been given to the one under consideration, for bibliomania is older in the technology of this kind of nosology than dipsomania, which is now understood to be an almost established ground for seclusion, and deprivation of the management of one's own affairs.

    The Book-Hunter A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author John Hill Burton

  • By the time the book came out, Kraepelinian nosology was all the rage in psychiatric circles; a standardized language had been just what the doctor ordered, and psychiatrists everywhere awaited every new edition with great anticipation.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • The answer has little to do with nosology or therapeutics and everything to do with marketing.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • While Adolf Meyer was bringing European nosology to the New World, America was working its charms on him.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • So was his therapeutic nihilism, his conviction that nosology was enough, that when it came to mental illness, there was nothing to be done for the patient.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • While his colleagues were getting a head start on cocktail hour, however, Spitzer and a small group of researchers were busy at work, creating a reliable nosology.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • Without a reliable nosology—a systematic way to name the varieties of insanity—doctors could neither communicate with one another or, more important, demonstrate to a patient, his family, and the general public that they knew what they were talking about when they rendered a diagnosis.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

  • So just a few years before Prozac came along, psychiatrists turned to what they called a descriptive nosology.

    MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION Gary Greenberg 2010

Comments

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  • I love how this word, which describes the classification of diseases, has nothing to do with noses per se, but in some cases (diseases of the nose, obviously) might, just to keep things confusing.

    February 26, 2007

  • good word :)

    February 26, 2007