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''ague'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904152658-00-⌔

ague - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

ague (countable and uncountable, plural agues)

  • (obsolete) An acute fever.
  • (pathology) An intermittent fever, attended by alternate cold and hot fits.
    • ✤ He had to capture some character and get out of that rest room before his ague got so bad that the sergeant had to carry him to and from the booth every day.1
    • ✤ He shivered all the while, so violently, that it was quite as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it off.
      “I think you have got the ague,” said I.
      “I’m much of your opinion, boy,” said he.
      “It’s bad about here,” I told him. “You’ve been lying out on the meshes, and they’re dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”      2
    • ✤ * Ague and lake fever had attacked our new settlement. The men in the shanty were all down with it, and my husband was confined to his bed on each alternate day, unable to raise hand or foot, and raving in the delirium of the fever.*3
    • ✤ *’Twere hard to say who fared the best:
      Sad mortals! thus the Gods still plague you!
      He lost his labour, I my jest:
      For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague *4
  • The cold fit or rigor of an intermittent fever.
    • ✤ *fever and ague *
  • A chill, or state of shaking, as with cold.
    • ✤ *I ’scap’d with one cold fit of an ague *5
  • (obsolete) Malaria.
    • ✤ Where I’m from, people have learned that mosquitoes carry ague.6

Verb

ague (third-person singular simple present agues, present participle aguing, simple past and past participle agued)

  • (transitive) To strike with an ague, or with a cold fit.

Etymology

From Middle English agu, ague, borrowed from Middle French (fievre) aguë, “acute (fever)” (Modern French fièvre aiguë), from Late Latin (febris) acuta (“acute fever”), from Latin acūtus (“sharp, acute”) + febris (“fever”).

Doublet of acute.

Pronunciation

  • enPR: āʹgyo͞o, IPA: /ˈeɪ.ɡju/
  • Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-09-04.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1963 (date written), John Kennedy Toole, chapter 8, in A Confederacy of Dunces, London: Penguin Books, published 1980 (1981 printing), →ISBN, page 163: ↩

  2. 1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter III, in Great Expectations […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, pages 35–36: ↩

  3. 1852, Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush: or, Forest Life in Canada: ↩

  4. 1810, Lord Byron, Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos: ↩

  5. November 23, 1698, John Dryden, letter to Mrs Stewart ↩

  6. 1979, Octavia Butler, Kindred: ↩

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