smallpox

From small +‎ pox.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈsmɔːlpɒks/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

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

smallpox (usually uncountable, plural smallpoxes)

1. (pathology) An acute, highly infectious often fatal disease caused by Variola virus of the family Poxviridae. It was completely eradicated in the 1970s, but still exists in laboratories. Those who survived were left with pockmarks.

   Synonym: variola

   The Europeans brought new diseases such as smallpox, measles, dysentery, influenza, syphilis and leprosy.

   • 1973, Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, →ISBN, page 42:

     We know that the most deadly of the early epidemics in America were those of the eruptive fevers—smallpox, measles, typhus, and so on. The first to arrive and the deadliest, said contemporaries, was smallpox.

• smallpox on Wikipedia.Wikipedia