whooping cough

1. 1.

   a disease of the respiratory mucous membrane

   Synonymspertussis

   Broaderinfectious diseaserespiratory disease

Questions about whooping cough

What does whooping cough mean?

whooping cough means "a disease of the respiratory mucous membrane".

What is another word for whooping cough?

Close synonyms include pertussis. 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 whooping cough a common word?

whooping cough 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.