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say it: TET-uh-nuhs
tetanus is a noun meaning "an acute and serious infection of the central nervous system caused by bacterial infection of open wounds; spasms of the jaw and laryngeal muscles may occur during the late stages". It is pronounced /ˈtɛtənəs/ — TET-uh-nuhs. It carries 2 recorded senses.
a sustained muscular contraction resulting from a rapid series of nerve impulses
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 tetanus 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.