cathartic

• cathartick (obsolete)

Learned borrowing from New Latin catharticus, from Ancient Greek καθαρτικός (kathartikós).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /kəˈθɑɹtɪk/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)tɪk

cathartic (comparative more cathartic, superlative most cathartic)

1. Purgative; inducing mental or physical catharsis.

   Shaving, my favorite activity, is very cathartic.

2. That which releases emotional tension, especially after an overwhelming experience.
   • 2023 November 1, Ian Prosser talks to Stefanie Foster, “Safety Mission: Possible”, in RAIL, number 995, page 37:

     "So, there are real opportunities to create real change with enforcement." Prosser describes how some of that change is also cathartic to those who have been directly affected by incidents on the railway, such as the families who have lost loved ones.

   • 2025 April 7, Simon Montlake, Caitlin Babcock, Ali Martin, Cameron Pugh, Jingnan Peng, “Is the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ starting to find its voice again?”, in The Christian Science Monitor:

     For some, Saturday’s protests were cathartic, a show of force and solidarity by progressives who had struggled to pick themselves up from last November’s election defeat.

cathartic (plural cathartics)

1. (medicine) A laxative.
   • 1833, R. J. Bertin, translated by Charles W. Chauncy, Treatise on the Diseases of the Heart, and Great Vessels, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blnachard, page 165:

     The disease was regarded as pneumonia so far advanced that suppuration seemed to have supervened; bleeding, blisters, expectorants, and cathartics diminished the symptoms; the pulse continued frequent, hard, full, but always regular.

   • 2022, Seth Garfield, Guaraná […] , Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, →ISBN:

     As Jan McTavish notes, when the physician diagnosed the headache's origins in the digestive system, particularly constipation, the antidote might entail cathartics (substances that accelerate defecation) or emetics(inducers of vomiting) and other regulators of the digestive process.

Borrowed from French cathartique, from New Latin catharticus, from Ancient Greek καθαρτικός (kathartikós).

cathartic m or n (feminine singular cathartică, masculine plural cathartici, feminine and neuter plural cathartice)

1. cathartic