puerperal

Estimated CEFR level: C2 — Proficiency

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

adjective relating to or connected with or occurring at the time of childbirth or shortly following, or to the woman who has just given birth

From New Latin puerperālis, from Latin puerpera (“woman in childbirth”), from puer (“child”) + pariō (“to bear”).

A woman who had been recently confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. — The Dop Doctor, Richard Dehan
The doctors said that it was puerperal fever, and that it was ninety-nine chances in a hundred it would end in death. — Anna Karenina, Leo, graf Tolstoy
Singular, communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. — Ulysses, James Joyce

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