| murrain \meh-REYN\ (noun) - A plague, a pestilence, especially affecting cattle, such as anthrax or foot-and-mouth disease; any horrendous event.
"A murrain upon your head!" or, as Trinculo put it in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' (III, ii, 50), "A murrain on your monster, and the devil take your fingers!"
Borrowed from Old French morine, from Medieval Latin morina, a noun from Latin mori "to die," whose irregular past participle "mortus" underlies "mortal," "mortuary," and "mortgage." This verb may be related to mordere "to bite," underlying "morsel." It is certainly akin to morbus "diseased" from which we derive "morbid." The "mare" in "nightmare" originally referred to a female goblin who attacked people asleep at night. It, too, is related. |
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