Idiosyncrasy GRE Vocabulary Flashcard

Idiosyncrasy GRE Vocabulary Flashcard

/ˌɪd.i.əˈsɪŋ.krə.si/ (noun)

Definition

a weird style or way of thinking, behaving or responding to a situation owned by a person, habit, thinking mode, eccentricity, oddity, unorthodoxy, peculiarity, feature, whim, mannerism, foible, quirk, characteristic, caprice, humor

Example

When your doctor prescribes a medication, neither you nor the doctor expect it to be a life-threatening drug, but sometimes it is just that. In pharmacology, idiosyncrasy refers to an idiosyncratic reaction, which is an adverse effect to an agent, such as a drug, which doesn’t occur in most patients who’ve used the same agent.

That shouldn’t be too surprising. In layman’s terms, when we say someone has a certain idiosyncrasy, we refer to a habit or mannerism that’s peculiar to that person. Well, an idiosyncratic reaction is an abnormal event, stemming from the use of a compound, which is peculiar, meaning specific, to an individual.

Source: https://study.com/

Parts of speech

Noun: idiosyncratic

Adverb: idiosyncratically