myasthenia

1. 1.

   a chronic progressive disease characterized by chronic fatigue and muscular weakness (especially in the face and neck); caused by a deficiency of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junctions

   Synonymsmyasthenia gravis

   Broaderdisease of the neuromuscular junctionautoimmune disease
2. 2.

   any muscular weakness

   Broaderphysical condition

Other forms of myasthenia

plural

myasthenias·

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.

Questions about myasthenia

What does myasthenia mean?

myasthenia means "a chronic progressive disease characterized by chronic fatigue and muscular weakness (especially in the face and neck); caused by a deficiency of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junctions". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in myasthenia?

myasthenia has 4 syllables: my-as-the-nia. The stress falls on "as".

What is another word for myasthenia?

Close synonyms include myasthenia gravis. 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 myasthenia a common word?

myasthenia 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.