pestis

Other forms of pestis

plural

pestises·

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 pestis

What does pestis mean?

pestis means "a serious (sometimes fatal) infection of rodents caused by Yersinia pestis and accidentally transmitted to humans by the bite of a flea that has bitten an infected animal".

How many syllables are in pestis?

pestis has 2 syllables and divides as pe-stis under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for pestis?

Close synonyms include plague, pestilence, pest. 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 pestis a common word?

pestis 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.