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metastasis.

A change in nature, form, or quality.

10 characters4 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/mɪˈtæstəsɪs/Received-Pronunciation/mɪˈtastəsɪs/British, Southern, Standard/məˈtæstəsəs/General-American/mɪˈtæstəsiːs/Received-Pronunciation
  1. A change in nature, form, or quality.

    countable · uncountable
  2. The spread of something harmful to another location, such as the metastasis of a cancer.

    countable · figuratively · uncountable
  3. A sudden or rapid transition from one point, topic or argument to another, often to evade an uncomfortable subject or to redirect the discussion.

    countable · rhetoric · uncountable
  4. The transference of a bodily function or disease to another part of the body, specifically the development of a secondary area of disease remote from the original site, as with some cancers.

    countable · uncountable
Where this word comes from

Learned borrowing from Late Latin metastasis (“(rhetoric) rapid or sudden transition from one argument, point, or topic to another”), and from its etymons Koine Greek μετάστασις (metástasis, “(rhetoric) rapid or sudden transition from one argument, point, or topic to another”) and Ancient Greek μετάστασις (metástasis, “change; removal; (medicine) movement of disease, pain, etc., from one part of the body to another”), from μετᾰ- (metă-, prefix denoting change in condition or position) (possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *meth₂) + στᾰ́σῐς (stắsĭs, “condition, state; position”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *steh₂- (“to stand (up)”)), modelled after μεθιστάναι (methistánai, “to change; to remove”). By surface analysis, meta- + stasis. In reference to the spread of cancer, a semantic loan from French métastase, whose use to refer to it was coined in 1829 by the French gynecologist Joseph Récamier (1774–1852). The plural form metastases is a learned borrowing from Late Latin metastases.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.