lethargic

adj
/ləˈθɑɹd͡ʒɪk/CA/ləˈθɑːd͡ʒək//ləˈθɑː.d͡ʒɪk/UK

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ληθαργικός (lēthargikós), from λήθαργος (lḗthargos, “forgetful, lethargic”), from λήθη (lḗthē, “a forgetting, forgetfulness”) (from which Lethe (“river in Hades”)) + ἀργός (argós, “not working”). By surface analysis, lethargy + -ic.

  1. learned borrowing from ληθαργικός

Definitions

  1. Sluggish, slow.

    • [That cat] hasn't caught a mouse since he was a slip of a kitten. Except when eating, he does nothing but sleep. Lethargic is the word that springs to the lips. If you cast an eye on him, you will see that he's asleep now.
    • She was, in fact, constitutionally impervious to statistics and preferred to study the be-headphoned group of fifteen or so lethargic wanderers who were taking even less notice of the remorseless squawkings than she was.
  2. Indifferent, apathetic.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at lethargic. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01lethargic02indifferent03lack04failing05fail06achieve07performance08execution09death10inert

A definitional loop anchored at lethargic. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

10 hops · closes at lethargic

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA