mental retardation

Questions about mental retardation

What does mental retardation mean?

mental retardation means "lack of normal development of intellectual capacities".

What is another word for mental retardation?

Close synonyms include retardation, backwardness, slowness, subnormality. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is mental retardation a common word?

mental retardation is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.