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Smallpox is a very dangerous disease that used to kill or badly scar millions of people. It caused a high fever and painful spots (called pox) all over the skin, which often left permanent scars, and it spread easily from person to person. The important thing to know is that smallpox is now gone from the world — it was completely wiped out by vaccines in 1980, the only human disease we have ever fully erased. You will usually meet this word in history or science class, not in everyday conversation.
天花（已被人類消滅的傳染病）
組成small + pox. 'Pox' is an old word for the spotty marks a disease leaves on the skin. 'Small' was added to tell it apart from an older disease called 'the great pox' (syphilis), which caused bigger sores.
同家族的字
- chickenpoxanother disease with pox in its name, since it also causes spotty marks on the skin, though it is much milder
原始詞典資料1 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。
smallpoxnoun/ˈsmɔːlpɒks/
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medicinepathologysciencesAn acute, highly infectious often fatal disease caused by Variola virus of the family Poxviridae. It was completely eradicated in the 1970s, but still exists in laboratories. Those who survived were left with pockmarks.
- The Europeans brought new diseases such as smallpox, measles, dysentery, influenza, syphilis and leprosy.
- We know that the most deadly of the early epidemics in America were those of the eruptive fevers—smallpox, measles, typhus, and so on. The first to arrive and the deadliest, said contemporaries, was smallpox.
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。