phlegmatic
adjective
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Phlegm and the Four Temperaments
According to the ancient Greeks, human personalities were controlled by four bodily fluids or semifluids called humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each humor was associated with one of the four basic elements: air, earth, fire, and water. Phlegm was paired with water—the cold, moist element—and it was believed to impart the cool, calm, unemotional personality we now call the "phlegmatic type." That's a bit odd, given that the term derives from the Greek phlegma, which literally means "flame," perhaps a reflection of the inflammation that colds and flus often bring.
Examples of phlegmatic in a Sentence
Matt Ridley, Genome, 1999
Why would a man live like this? Alone on the godforsaken prairie surrounded by whispering cornfields and phlegmatic Swedes if instead you could go to picture shows and snazzy restaurants and dance with a beautiful woman with her head on your shoulder and her perfume driving you wild?
—Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance, 1991
But Einstein was phlegmatic: when a book was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, he retorted, "If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!"
—Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988
a strangely phlegmatic response to what should have been happy news
Fintan O’Toole, Foreign Affairs, 21 Feb. 2023
Capper struck me as phlegmatic about the power of the supermarkets.
—Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 4 May 2024
Enter, then, Penélope Cruz, the raging storm to Driver’s phlegmatic calm, and the ultimate heart of a film that sometimes prefers to keep it hidden.
—Guy Lodge, Variety, 31 Aug. 2023
Yet while Chamberlain is the story’s champion — a noble defender, historical bone of contention and revisionist argument rolled into one phlegmatic figure — the movie’s more energetic and visually engaging heroic duties have been relegated to Hugh, Paul and the supporting players in their orbits.
—New York Times, 20 Jan. 2022
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Cite this Entry
“Phlegmatic.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phlegmatic. Accessed 13 Mar. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
from earlier phlegm "one of the four body fluids once believed to affect a person's health," from Middle English fleume (same meaning), from early French fleume (same meaning), from Latin phlegma (same meaning), from Greek phlegma "flame, phlegm" see Word History at humor
Medical Definition
phlegmatic
adjective
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