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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

cancerousness en · NOUN

Etymology

Etymology tree English cancerous Proto-Germanic *-inōną Proto-Indo-European *-dyé- Proto-Germanic *-atjaną Proto-Indo-European *-tus Proto-Germanic *-þuz Proto-Germanic *-assuz Proto-Germanic *-inassuz Proto-West Germanic *-nassī Old English -nes Middle English -nesse English -ness English cancerousness From cancerous + -ness.

Meanings

  1. (uncountable) The state or quality of being cancerous.
    • Starting in 1999, he began to mutate particular genes in human cells in culture and then to “interrogate” them for their cancerousness. 2009, Catherine Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres:
    • If, on the other hand, a tumor consist chiefly of fibre or fibrillating blastema, the presumption of its cancerousness diminishes; we have, however, seen a growth in the liver, which had all the aspect of a scirrhous formation, and probably was so, which yet consisted solely of fibre-forming solid blastema. 1854, Charles Handfield Jones, A Manual of pathological anatomy:
    • Only one line of mouse cells will perform this trick— a line called NIH 3T3 that has been bred in the laboratory for so many generations that it has long since forgotten what normality is, and is within a whisker of cancerousness even without the intervention of extraneous oncogenes. 1983 June 9, New Scientist, volume 98, number 1361, page 691: