enfeeble
/ɪnˈfiːb(ə)l
/ /ɛnˈfiːb(ə)l/verb [with object] (often as adjective enfeebled)
Make weak or feeble: trade unions are in an enfeebled state...
- He was a weak, completely enfeebled old man, between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty years old.
- When you are old and enfeebled your muscles don't work very well, you can't cough and you are at risk of pneumonia.
- The institutions that are supposed to be providing these checks and balances seem to be temporarily enfeebled.
Synonyms
weaken, make weak, make feeble, debilitate, incapacitate, indispose, prostrate, immobilize, lay low, disable, handicap, cripple, paralyse;
drain, sap, exhaust, tire, fatigue, devitalize
informal knock out, do in, shatter
British informal knacker
rare torpefy
Derivatives
enfeeblement
/ /ɛnˈfiːb(ə)lm(ə)nt / noun ...- Once again, though with sympathy and concern this time, he was writing of a grave ailment: the pandemic enfeeblement in Australia's institutions of higher learning.
- What worries me is that there will be enfeeblement, helplessness, that I will go on for years unable to sense my decline, my lunacy, and oblivious to all my indignities.
- Driven by ever accelerating information technology and the greed of the affluent, this process is leading inexorably to an enfeeblement of the weak and alienation of the poor.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French enfeblir, from en- (expressing a change of state) + feble 'feeble'.