deleterious
adjective
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When you hold down the delete key on your keyboard or touchscreen, the effect—whoosh!—is instantaneous (unless your device is laggy, of course). Deleterious effects, however, are often not so obvious; deleterious is used to describe things that are harmful in ways that are unexpected, slow-acting, or not readily apparent. Although most often used in formal speech and writing, deleterious is far from rare. It even pops up from time to time in film and television, especially from the mouths of wonky characters, as when Seven of Nine warns the Doctor in an episode of Star Trek Voyager, “The nebula is having a deleterious effect on all the ship’s technology,” or when Higgins exclaims in the original Magnum P.I. series, “It’s shocking what a deleterious effect a regimen of nothing but mushrooms can have on a man.” We’ll take your word for it, Higgins.
Synonyms
Examples of deleterious in a Sentence
Kristin B. Gunther, Association of American Geographers, 2002
Most everyone now knows the action of pressing mouse keys is far more deleterious to the tender structures of the wrist and hand than typing is.
—Michael Finley, Albany (New York) Times-Union, 2 Sept. 1998
This skewed allocation of resources away from those most in need, in turn, insures that many young people from low-income families will continue to be shut out of the economy, with obvious deleterious family and social consequences.
—Iris C. Rotberg, Education Week, 9 Mar. 1994
For as James Keirans pointed out to me, ticks are the world's most notorious carriers of the agents of diseases that strike animals, wild and domestic. And they rank second only to mosquitoes in their deleterious effect on humans.
—Edwards Park, Smithsonian, January 1987
The chemical is deleterious to the environment.
The drug has no deleterious effects on patients.
Theresa Iker / Made By History, TIME, 12 Dec. 2024
This will have an immediate and chilling impact on all diversity initiatives at all companies, again having a deleterious impact on the broader economy.
—Solange Charas, Forbes, 11 Dec. 2024
Not all of the longer-range Ioniq 5s can go that far; as EV aficionados know, fitting bigger wheels to one does deleterious things to its range.
—Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 3 Sep. 2024
The state would wield a deleterious influence on public education, with a rounded civic understanding of Israeli democracy replaced by a more baldly nationalist and illiberal one.
—Ilan Z. Baron, Foreign Affairs, 12 Aug. 2024
See all Example Sentences for deleterious 
Dictionary Entries Near deleterious
Cite this Entry
“Deleterious.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deleterious. Accessed 26 Dec. 2024.
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deleterious
adjective
Medical Definition
deleterious
adjective
Christine Gorman
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