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critical

Pronunciation: /ˈkɹɪt.ɪ.kəl/

The English word “critical” has 14 meanings listed here.

adjective

  1. Inclined to find fault or criticize.
  2. Pertaining to, or indicating, a crisis or turning point.
  3. Extremely important.
  4. Relating to criticism or careful analysis, such as literary or film criticism.
  5. Employing or related to textual criticism, particularly through a stemmatological comparison of all extant texts and reconstruction of the original.
  6. Of a patient condition involving unstable vital signs and a prognosis that predicts the condition could worsen; or, a patient condition that requires urgent treatment in an intensive care or critical care medical facility.
  7. In such a condition.
  8. Likely to go out of control if disturbed, that is, opposite of stable.
  9. Of the point (in temperature, reagent concentration etc.) where a nuclear or chemical reaction becomes self-sustaining.
  10. Of a temperature that is equal to the temperature of the critical point of a substance, i.e. the temperature above which the substance cannot be liquefied.
  11. Needing great discrimination to be correctly classified; easily confused.

noun

  1. A critical value, factor, etc.
  2. critical hit
  3. In breakdancing, a kind of airflare move in which the dancer hops from one hand to the other.

Etymology

From Latin criticus + English -al.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.