malaise

Etymology

It is borrowed from French malaise,^{[2][3][4][5][6]} from Old French malaise (“discomfort”), recorded from about 1135,^[2] literally "ill ease",^[6][7] formed from mal (“bad”) and aise (“ease”).^[2][3][8][9] The French adjective goes back to Latin malus (“bad”).^[4][8][5] The French word had already been taken into Middle English before 1300 as maleise, pain, suffering, and malayse, distress, sorrow,^[10][7] which survives as malease;^[2][8] Etymonline treats the modern sense as perhaps a reborrowing from French in the mid-18th century,^[7] and the OED calls the present word a reborrowing.^[2] The Anglo-Norman noun is recorded from the late 12th century, for hardship, adversity and suffering, including illness.^[11] A Middle English verb malasen (“to trouble, distress”), from malaisier, is recorded from the mid-15th century but did not last.^[7]

Earliest recorded meaning

A vague bodily discomfort, a lack of the feeling of physical well-being: 1768, in a letter of Lord Chesterfield.^[2] Merriam-Webster Unabridged also gives 1768 as the first known use,^[3] while Dictionary.com dates the word to 1760–70.^[12] In French this sense, an uncomfortable feeling of poor health, is recorded from 1587.^[2]

Semantic evolution

In Old French the word meant discomfort, difficulty or hardship, and the sense of a feeling of poor health appeared in Middle French in 1587;^[2][7] English took the word in this medical sense in the 18th century.^[2][8][5] French used it figuratively of a society or social group from the early 19th century,^[2] and English followed: from 1877, in Henry James's The American, it meant uneasiness of mind, and then an unhealthy state of an institution, an activity or a situation.^[2] Collins now gives as a separate sense a complex of problems that afflict a country or an economy, as in economic malaise.^[13]

Timeline

• 1768 – a vague feeling of bodily discomfort or of poor health.^[2][3]
• 1877 – figuratively, uneasiness of mind or spirit; an unhealthy state of an institution or a situation.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. A general feeling of physical discomfort or weakness, often a first sign of illness: A week of fever began with a vague malaise.^[3][13][2]
2. A vague feeling of mental or moral unease or depression.^[3][13][2]
3. A state of decline or weakness in a society, an organization or an economy that is hard to pin to one cause: the long malaise of the shipbuilding towns.^[13][2]

Related words

• disease
• ease
• malease
• mal-
• malice

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
4. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
7. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
8. ^ a b c d Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
10. ^ Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
11. ^ Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND2), Aberystwyth University, anglo-norman.net (2nd ed., 2005–)
12. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
13. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins