incontinent
/ɪnˈkɒntɪnənt
/adjective
1Having no or insufficient voluntary control over urination or defecation: elderly, incontinent parents...
- Two-hourly reminders to void may control many incontinent people, especially in the nursing home.
- A patient who is diabetic, receiving antibiotics or immunosuppressive therapy incontinent, or perspiring heavily faces additional risk: he or she could acquire a fungal skin infection.
- This covers the initial error and later events, when I went into retention a third time, lost the sensation of urination, and was doubly incontinent with diminished sensation in the genital region.
2Lacking self-restraint; uncontrolled: the incontinent hysteria of the massed pop fans...
- In this case ‘FU’ is a shorthand employed by party whips to describe sexually incontinent MPs who have thus far managed to keep their sordid secrets from their spouses but not the party managers.
- Some people - say, for example, certain sexually incontinent recovering Catholics - just don't take well to compromise, no matter how much or how little.
- Worse, instead of picking up plaudits and slowly building up a power base in Washington she found herself being derided as a doormat for her sexually incontinent husband.
Synonyms
unrestrained, uncontrolled, lacking self-restraint, unbridled, unchecked, ungoverned, uncurbed, unsuppressed, unfettered, untrammelled;
uncontrollable, ungovernable
Derivatives
incontinently
/ adverb ...- Journalism has always been a profession for misfits, contrarians, the incontinently curious, compulsives, obsessives, drunks and womanisers, the wilfully incompetent and the instinctively talented.
- He's never happier than when bodily fluids are flowing incontinently.
- On two continents, they incontinently spout platitudes, nonsense, tall tales, or pseudopoetic fantasies.
Origin
Late Middle English (in sense 2): from Old French, or from Latin incontinent-, from in- 'not' + continent- 'holding together' (see continent2). sense 1 dates from the early 19th century.