asphyxia

Estimated CEFR level: C2 — Proficiency

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

noun a condition in which insufficient or no oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged on a ventilatory basis; caused by choking or drowning or electric shock or poison gas

Learned borrowing from New Latin asphyxia, itself borrowed from Ancient Greek ἀσφυξία (asphuxía, “stopping of the pulse”).

Will it be by fire or asphyxia? — Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror, Trumbull White
I opened my mouth in order to breathe it in, for my mind had already become stupefied and forgetful of the past and was a prey, in the first stages of asphyxia, to the enchanting intoxication of a destroying and magic opium. — Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant
Instead of the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,—instead of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! — Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

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