swine flu
13
3.2
- noun
- /swaɪn flu/
- Specialized
:
gripe porcina
- My son and I both caught swine flu from the neighbor boy who got a vaccine for it.
- swine flu vaccine
- swine flu outbreak
- swine flu pandemic
My high school was when the swine flu outbreak started in my high school.
- My high school was when the swine flu outbreak started in my high school.
- Think of cancer, of bird flu, swine flu, SARS.
- You know, how like every few years there was always like a scare like swine flu or Ebola or bird flu or whatever.
- Another example is swine flu and trichinosis.
Examples
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What made swine flu so worrisome was the high death toll it wrought in Mexico.
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This was a big headline, and people got so scared of the swine flu they were doing things like closing schools to try and limit the spread of the flu.
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His son came down with the swine flu in 2009.
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Official: Closing schools in the face of swine flu may not be the best choice.
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By the time of the swine flu outbreak, however, the lesson had been learned.
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The campaign to combat the swine flu is different from the strategy usually employed against seasonal flu.
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Europeans were so paranoid about swine flu, they were walking around airports, wearing masks.
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They'd had 49 swine flu deaths reported so far, 17 in the prior week.
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In addition, no matter how logical it may seem, you cannot get swine flu by eating bacon, according to WebMD.
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Many people were concerned about the risk of contracting swine flu during the outbreak last year.
Synonyms
354
1.0
A common contagious illness that causes fever, aches, and coughs
50
3.3
A contagious illness caused by a virus that gives fever, body aches, and cough
A contagious lung disease in pigs that can sometimes spread to people
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly derivable from combining 'swine' (pig) and 'flu' (influenza): it denotes influenza affecting pigs (and sometimes transmitted to humans), following a regular noun-noun compounding pattern. This compositional structure is common cross-linguistically (e.g., Spanish 'gripe porcina', French 'grippe porcine'), so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Swine flu gets its name because the word swine means 'pigs' and the word flu is short for 'influenza', the sickness first found in pigs. So the name helps you remember it is a kind of influenza 'disease' that starts in pigs and can sometimes spread to people.