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say it: ep-uh-DEM-ik
epidemic is a noun and adjective meaning "a widespread outbreak of an infectious disease; many people are infected at the same time". It carries 2 recorded senses.
(especially of medicine) of disease or anything resembling a disease; attacking or affecting many individuals in a community or a population simultaneously
“an epidemic outbreak of influenza”
medicine
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for epidemic come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.