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A malediction is a wish, said out loud or written down, that something bad will happen to someone — in plain words, a curse. It is an old word from books. You will meet it in stories, history, and rather careful writing, not when a friend is simply angry in the street. People today more often say curse, or “put a curse on.” Though actually, it is about words meant to harm, not about a rude shout. Swearing at someone in traffic is not a malediction. The old idea is that saying the wish might make the harm real. A blessing said in church is the bright twin of this kind of speech; a malediction is the dark one.
詛咒（書面、文學用語，不是口語裡罵人的話）
組成From late Middle English, from French, from Latin maledictiō (a curse): malus (bad, evil) + dictiō (speech, a saying). So “evil speech” — words meant to hurt.
同家族的字
- benedictionthe opposite pattern: bene- means well, so a blessing instead of a curse
- dictionsame Latin piece for speech
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
maledictionnoun/ˌmæl.əˈdɪk.ʃən/
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A curse.
- [H]is friend, with great ebullience of paſſion, many praiſes of his own good play, and many maledictions on the power of chance, took up the cards, and threw them into the fire.
- In view of all that we have said in the foregoing sections, the many obstacles we appear to have surmounted, what casts the pall over our victory celebration? It is the curse of dimensionality, a malediction that has plagued the scientist from earliest days.
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Evil speech.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。