1 a large number of cases of a particular disease happening at the same time in a particular community:
the outbreak of a flu epidemic * an epidemic of measles * Effectively, tobacco companies will be exporting an epidemic of smoking-related diseases, the campaign suggests.
2 a sudden rapid increase in how often sth bad happens:
an epidemic of crime in the inner cities
epidemic adjective:
Car theft is now reaching epidemic proportions.
comparePANDEMIC
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for epidemic is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is epidemic a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, epidemic is tagged as noun.
Does epidemic appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — epidemic appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.