parasitic
/parəˈsɪtɪk
/adjective
1(Of an organism) living as a parasite: mistletoe is parasitic on trees...
- Since viruses are parasitic on cellular life, the first life could not have been anything like a virus.
- Some species are parasitic on insects, plants and animals, including man.
- Nevertheless, growing these parasitic plants in vitro is difficult, because of their dependence on a connection to hosts for normal development, and because of their specific germination requirements.
1.1Resulting from infestation by a parasite: mortality from parasitic diseases...
- Public health agencies focused their activities on infectious diseases, especially vaccine preventable and endemic parasitic diseases.
- Scabies is a contagious parasitic infection caused by infestation of the Sarcoptes scabiei var hominis mite.
- On the other hand, pathological conditions are marked by gall-like swellings and vermiform borings on exoskeletons that are thought to have been caused by diseases or parasitic infestation.
2 derogatory Habitually relying on or exploiting others: attacks on the parasitic existence of Party functionaries...
- Such music fests do not exist outside of a parasitic capitalist and Mafia-styled exploitive capitalist paradigm that is financed by the American government with American tax payer money.
- Revisionism is an historical discipline made necessary by the fact that all States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative burden upon the rest of society.
- He and Carlyle relied heavily on the parasitic rhetoric.
Synonyms
exploitative, parasitical
informal bloodsucking, sponging, freeloading
3 Phonetics (Of a speech sound) inserted without etymological justification (e.g. the b in thimble); epenthetic.
Derivatives
parasitical
- He sat at a table chaotic with books and papers, his typewriter a lonely sentinel of order; in the room, people came and went, acolytes, aspirants and hangers-on, some immensely talented, others merely parasitical.
- On the third hand, it could be argued that a largely parasitical underclass living on welfare and crime thrives only in big cities and ‘get out the vote’ drives do end up with a lot of them voting Democrat.
- He needs to draw on other people's lives and there is something very parasitical about that.
parasitically
/ adverb ...- The Fine Art tradition today does not live symbiotically with design: it lives parasitically off of the communicative and vital language established by design.
- In the tracking shot, the viewer becomes a ghostly guest moving parasitically along with the all-knowing camera as the space of the filmic world is mapped.
- In doing so, it revealed its weakness, prompting other nations to pick, parasitically, at America's weakness for their own short-term gains.
Origin
Early 17th century: via Latin from Greek parasitikos, from parasitos '(person) eating at another's table'.