dementiae

English

Etymology

From Latin dēmentiae, plural of dēmentia.

Noun

dementiae

1. plural of dementia
   • 1973 December 29, The Spectator, page 849, column 4:

     It is not just that what has been served up in our two opera houses has been either inertly routine or strangely misguided, but that this should be accepted as the norm by both public and press that induces all manner of dementiae.

   • 1986, The Compendium of Continuing Education in Dentistry, page 508, column 1:

     Approximately 20% of all dementiae can be reversed if they are correctly diagnosed and treated.

   • 1990, Claude-Alain Hauert, “Developmental Psychology: A Brief Inventory of Fixtures”, in Developmental Psychology: Cognitive, Perceptuo-Motor and Neuropsychological Perspectives (Advances in Psychology; 64), North-Holland, pages 421–422:

     Or, second, are these imitation responses related to the oral reflex observed in the development of certain senile dementiae? […] If such an analogy made sense, this would mean that neonatal imitation might be a reflex similar to the grasping reflex or to the cardinal points, reflexes which disappear in the first six months of life and, in some cases, reappear in senile dementiae.

   • 1993, Recent Advances in Aging Science, page 723:

     The increasing aging of the population determines a constant growth of the dementiae until becoming a real epidemic.

   • 1998 November, Judy Dothard Simmons, “Alzheimer’s Disease News Mixed: Prevention, cure still elusive but treatment picture improves”, in The New Crisis: The Magazine of Opportunities and Ideas, page 33, column 1:

     Dementiae can arise from such things as depression, drug reactions and nutritional deficiencies as well as from brain disease.

   • 2005, Rafi Zabor, I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pages 91–92:

     “Hello?” she said. I tried to gauge by the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes the stage of her mind’s undoing, but she was not my mother, and no two dementiae sing the same tune.

Latin

Noun

dēmentiae f

1. inflection of dēmentia (“madness, insanity”):
   1. nominative/vocative plural
   2. genitive/dative singular