hemorrhage
Americannoun
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hemorrhages
plural
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a profuse discharge of blood, as from a ruptured blood vessel; bleeding.
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the loss of assets, especially in large amounts.
-
any widespread or uncontrolled loss or diffusion.
verb (used without object)
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to bleed profusely.
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to lose assets, especially in large amounts.
verb (used with object)
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of hemorrhage
1665–75; < Latin haemorrhagia < Greek haimorrhagía. See hemo-, -rrhagia
Explanation
Medically speaking, a hemorrhage is a rapid loss of blood. If you fall and hit your head really hard, the doctors will check to see there's no cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in your brain. Hemorrhage is pronounced HEM-or-edge. Blame the Greeks for the funny spelling, because like many medical terms, this one comes from Greek roots. Besides the medical meaning, we use hemorrhage to mean the uncontrollable loss of other things. If sudden disaster is making you hemorrhage money, you'll have to cut back on fancy dinners and new shoes. Can I recommend frozen pizza?
Vocabulary lists containing hemorrhage
The Catcher in the Rye
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Maus I: My Father Bleeds History
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The Mayo Clinic says a subarachnoid hemorrhage is a type of stroke that involves bleeding in the space between the brain and the tissues that cover the brain.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 14, 2026
Kikuo Hatakeyama, 72, has served as the mayor of Hachirogata in north-east Japan since 2008, but fell ill in February and suffered a brain hemorrhage.
From BBC ● May 9, 2026
The researchers also found strong evidence that daily aspirin increases the risk of serious extracranial hemorrhage and likely raises the risk of hemorrhagic stroke.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 4, 2026
Doctors found that he had suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage resulting from a ruptured brain aneurysm.
From Slate ● Dec. 8, 2025
An Irukandji sting results in excruciating headache and body pain, vomiting, sweating, anxiety, dangerously fast heartbeat, brain hemorrhage, and fluid in the lungs.
From "The Thing About Jellyfish" by Ali Benjamin
Monoclonal antibodies that are indicated for the early treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, for example, have a risk of brain hemorrhages and bleeds.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 10, 2026
Fluffy white clouds and red hemorrhages, the work of cytomegalovirus, bloomed across patients’ retinas until they went blind.
From Slate ● Jan. 31, 2025
And then, on one random Wednesday, my left eye hemorrhages and fills with blood.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 30, 2024
She helps singers dealing with polyps, nodules, hemorrhages, cysts, acid reflux, vocal fold swelling.
From New York Times ● Feb. 7, 2024
He entered the clinic bleeding from a number of hemorrhages.
From "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson
But as this upstart took on the PGA Tour, LIV struggled to gain a commercial foothold and hemorrhaged money after teeing off in 2022.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 29, 2026
The early days were rife with failure and the operation hemorrhaged money.
From Barron's ● May 20, 2026
Like so many legacy media companies, it hemorrhaged money as it proved slow to adjust to the digital revolution.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 14, 2025
For almost 90 miles, he pushed the other plane as both jets hemorrhaged fuel, until they crossed the border with Laos.
From New York Times ● Dec. 21, 2023
They had both hemorrhaged badly, and blood plasma was in short supply our needs being low on the wartime priority list.
From "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Houston
Furthermore, Apple’s focus on hardware would have made good business sense even if the frontier AI labs weren’t hemorrhaging cash, and even if those labs had found lots of profitable commercial applications for their models.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 2, 2026
The tax — a half-penny of every dollar spent in the county — is meant to prop up local hospitals and clinics that are hemorrhaging funding after recent federal cuts.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 3, 2026
Waldorf’s sister, Elizabeth Rowe, had almost died of hemorrhaging during childbirth, so the family felt an hourslong drive to Kansas through rural roads without medical support was not an option.
From Salon ● May 27, 2026
“They’re saving on equipment but hemorrhaging men instead. The approach is yielding diminishing gains,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 12, 2026
But eventually I started to see why the business was hemorrhaging money.
From "Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
