the pox
3
9.9
- noun
- /ðə pɑks/
- Archaic
:
la viruela
- His face is scarred from the pox, lined from the weather; his hands are rough from work.
- get the pox
Examples
-
He lies ill on the kitchen floor with the pox.
-
The pox of our white man has taken many of our people.
-
Just lost her whole family to the pox, and it's left her homeless.
-
When I applied for payment... you had me driven from this palace as though I had the pox.
-
Your whole family's got the pox, boy !
-
And Fendrith had been claimed only last year by an epidemic of the pox that had swept through the land.
Fiction book (1998) -
She has the pox.
-
This hospital boasted that it "receives, feeds, and tends all poor sufferers, wherever they come from and whatever ailment they may have, even plague victims, though not if they have the pox."
Academic text (2014) -
According to Willem Bosman, who spent many years on Africa's Gold Coast, the worst disease was the pox, which killed thousands (Bosman 1721, 95).
Academic text (2018) -
He lies ill on the kitchen floor with the pox.
Synonyms
77
3.9
A very contagious disease that causes fever and many skin sores that leave scars
Surface Forms
Morphology
the + pox
The phrase is simply the definite article 'the' plus the noun 'pox' (a disease with blisters), so a learner who knows 'pox' will readily interpret 'the pox' as that disease (e.g., smallpox). The structure is fully compositional and follows a common determiner + noun pattern; only historical or specific referential nuances (smallpox vs. syphilis) require extra cultural knowledge but do not block basic understanding.
Etymology
The pox comes from an old word for a sore or spot on the skin. People called very bad, contagious illnesses like 'smallpox' or syphilis the pox because those diseases made many sores, so the phrase came to mean 'a contagious skin disease'.