dissociative
Americanadjective
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Psychiatry. relating to or exhibiting a condition in which a group of mental processes is split off from the main body of consciousness, as in amnesia or certain forms of hysteria.
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Physical Chemistry. relating to, tending toward, or exhibiting the reversible resolution or decomposition of a complex substance into simpler components.
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relating to a disjunction or separation between two or more things.
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.
There are so many overwhelming ideas in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” that, at over two hours, it does have the sense of a dissociative doomscroll.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 12, 2026
Now you are living in a world that is constantly dissociative thanks to social media.
From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 24, 2025
“When I met her in 1997, she was having dissociative episodes,” says primate communication scientist Mary Lee Jensvold.
From Salon • Jun. 5, 2024
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the book in which the term multiple personality disorder was changed to dissociative identity disorder.
From New York Times • May 2, 2024
Very few had taken to agriculture, for which, indeed, the dry soil was seldom fitted, and the half-nomadic life of stock-farmers, each pasturing his cattle over great tracts of country, confirmed their dissociative instincts.
From Impressions of South Africa by Bryce, James Bryce, Viscount
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
