Definition of "sickness"

sickness

/ˈsɪknɪs/

noun
usually uncountable, plural sicknesses
1. The quality or state of being sick or diseased; illness.
  Quotations
  I do lament the sickness of the king.
  c. 1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Richard the Third: […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act II, scene ii]
  Trust not too much your now resistless charms; Those, age or sickness soon or late disarms.
  18th century, Alexander Pope, Epistle to Miss Blount
  Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.
  23 March 1816, Jane Austen, a letter
2. Nausea; qualmishness; as, sickness of stomach.
3. (linguistics) The analogical misuse of a rarer or marked grammatical case in the place of a more common or unmarked case.
  Quotations
  We can now return to the question of how we treat the phenomenon of dative sickness (the possibility of substituting dative in place of accusative on the experiencer nominal) in Icelandic.
  1997, Michael B. Smith, “§ 4.7”, in Quirky Case in Icelandic

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