Climactic vs Climacteric - What's the difference?
climactic | climacteric |
Of, pertaining to, or constituting a climax; reaching a decisive moment or point of greatest tension.
* The race ended in a climactic , neck-and-neck scramble for the finish line.
Pertaining to any of several supposedly critical years of a person's life.
* 1971 , , Religion and the Decline of Magic , Folio Society 2012, p. 596:
Critical or crucial; decisive.
(medicine) Relating to a period of physiological change during middle age; especially, menopausal.
Climactic.
A critical stage or decisive point; a turning point.
* Southey
* , p. 66-67.
* Burke, Edmund. , p. 52.
A period in human life in which some great change is supposed to take place, calculated in different ways by different authorities (often identified as every seventh or ninth year).
(medicine) The period of life that leads up to and follows the end of menstruation in women; the menopause.
* 1998 , Smith, Roger N J, and Studd, John W. W., The Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy , p. 8:
As adjectives the difference between climactic and climacteric
is that climactic is of, pertaining to, or constituting a climax; reaching a decisive moment or point of greatest tension while climacteric is pertaining to any of several supposedly critical years of a person's life.As a noun climacteric is
a critical stage or decisive point; a turning point.climactic
English
Adjective
(en adjective)Usage notes
Do not confuse with climatic, which relates to climate.climacteric
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Closely parallel to the belief in unlucky days was the notion of climacteric years, those periodic dates in a man's life which were potential turning-points in his health and fortune.
Noun
(en noun)- It is your lot, as it was mine, to live during one of the grand climacterics of the world.
- [H]e was in his grand climacterick , with a florid brow, and a step like youthful agility. Sigourney, Lydia.
- I should hardly yield my rigid fibers to be regenerated by them; nor begin, in my grand climacteric , to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.
- Once women have traversed the turmoil of the climacteric years and reached the hormonal steady-state of the post-menopause, there is almost certainly no increase in the incidence of depression.
