Tarantism meaning

tăr'ən-tĭz'əm
A disorder characterized by an uncontrollable urge to dance, especially prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th to the 17th century and popularly attributed to the bite of a tarantula.
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A nervous disease characterized by hysteria and popularly believed to be curable by dancing or manifested by a mania for dancing: prevalent in S Italy during the 16th and 17th cent.
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A disorder characterized by an uncontrollable urge to dance, especially prevalent in southern Italy from the 15th to the 17th century and popularly attributed to the bite of a tarantula.
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(obsolete, medicine) An extreme urge to dance, popularly thought to have been caused by the bite of a tarantula and prevalent in southern Italy in the 15th through 17th centuries.
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Origin of tarantism

  • New Latin tarantismus after Taranto
    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

Tarantism Sentence Examples

  • Like all spiders, the tarantula possesses poison glands in its jaws, but there is not a particle of trustworthy evidence that the secretion of these glands is more virulent than that of other spiders of the same size, and the medieval belief that the bite of the spider gave rise to tarantism has long been abandoned.

  • TARANTULA, strictly speaking, a large spider (Lycosa tarantula), which takes its name from the town of Taranto, (Tarentum) in Apulia, near which it occurs and where it was formerly believed to be the cause of the malady known as "tarantism."

  • The name tarantella, in use at the present time, applies both to a dance still in vogue in Southern Italy and also to musical pieces resembling in their stimulating measures those that were necessary to rouse to activity the sufferer from tarantism in the middle ages.

  • In the town of Taranto victims of the tarantula danced a frenzied tarantella to prevent death from tarantism.

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Words near tarantism in the Dictionary