Meaning & use
pyrexia
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Meaning
noununcountablemedicaltechnical
A body temperature higher than normal, caused by illness or infection.
Grammar: Uncountable, used in clinical writing: the patient had pyrexia, not a pyrexia.
Patterns
- pyrexia of unknown origin
The patient presented with pyrexia and a persistent cough.
Pyrexia after surgery can be a sign of infection.
The nurse recorded pyrexia of 39 degrees on the chart.
Common combinations
- persistent pyrexia
- Persistent pyrexia led the doctors to order further tests.
- pyrexia of unknown origin
- Pyrexia of unknown origin is a puzzling diagnosis.
- postoperative pyrexia
- Postoperative pyrexia was treated with antibiotics.
- mild pyrexia
- The child showed mild pyrexia overnight.
- drug-induced pyrexia
- Drug-induced pyrexia stopped when the medicine was changed.
Synonyms and how they differ
- fever
- Fever is the everyday word, while pyrexia is the clinical term used in medical notes and textbooks.
- high temperature
- High temperature is the plain British phrase patients use, and it is less formal than pyrexia.
- febrility
- Febrility is a rare, formal word for the state of having a fever, and it sounds more literary than pyrexia.
Opposites
Word family
- pyrexial adjective
- relating to fever, or having a fever
- pyretic adjective
- relating to or causing fever
- antipyretic adjective
- reducing fever, as in an antipyretic drug
- apyrexia noun
- the absence of fever
Commonly confused: pyrexia or hyperthermia?
pyrexia vs hyperthermia
Hyperthermia is a dangerously high body temperature caused by overheating, such as heat stroke, while pyrexia is a fever the body raises on purpose to fight illness.
Practice
The nurse recorded a temperature of 39.2 degrees Celsius and noted ___ in the patient's chart.
Choose one answer.
Pyrexia means fever, which fits a temperature of 39.2. Hypothermia is a low temperature, anemia is a lack of red blood cells, and hypotension is low blood pressure.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “pyrexia”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.