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# cretin

«cretin» in Mova's early modern english dictionary: **person with a disability** — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples.

### kind

archaic word

### modern equivalent

person with a disability

### part of speech

noun

### meaning for a pupil

A person born with a serious illness that stops the body and mind growing properly. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/emode/C/cretin/#m1)

### how it differs from today

Today this word is an insult, and doctors use other words. In these sentences it is the old medical term for a person with that illness.

### examples

- The poor cretin crept away to his bed, and nothing was seen of him during the whole of the following day. (Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen) [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/emode/C/cretin/#x1)
- Valais was then, as he expressed it, only a closed-up bag, quite full of sick people, miserable cretins; but the French soldiers came, and they were capital doctors, they soon killed the disease and the sick people, too. (Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen) [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/emode/C/cretin/#x2)

### primary record

cretin

### tests

rate: word (≥3 uses, never in EWT or ≥10× EWT, Wiktionary: first sense archaic); corpora 3 (Torah 0, tales 3, Sefer Yetzirah 0); EWT 0; ratio 0.3 (Torah alone 0.0); Wiktionary archaic (first sense)

### Trees and pragmatics

[Every meaning and example of «cretin» parsed by Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/emode/C/cretin/), each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.