deleterious
in a sentence

As he would say, "To use the dreaded word 'cancer' in connection with any clinical procedure on an ill person is potentially deleterious to that patient's well-being, because it may suggest to him (rightly or wrongly) that his diagnosis is cancer or that his prognosis is poor." (source)
deleterious = harmful

He required his pupils to take the following oath: I will follow that system or regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider to be for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. (source) Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World, 1991

3 percent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man. (source)

The combination of being so roughly handled by Barb Wiggin and discovering that my grandmother had been free to attend the pageant—but had chosen not to attend—was deleterious to Owen's mood; he grew cranky and petulant.† (source)

And weight carried around the middle is more deleterious than extra pounds in the butt.† (source)

"Dex," as it is known, can temporarily negate the deleterious effects of altitude; each member of Fischer's team carried repared syringe of the drug in a plastic toothbrush case inside a prep his or her down suit, where it wouldn't freeze, for emergencies.† (source) Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, 1997

Moody had tried to tell me that it had no deleterious effects in Iran, but I knew that many of the couples in this room were cousins married to cousins.† (source)

I'm afraid that a process has been set in motion in which the deleterious effects are hard to foresee," Sandberg said.† (source)

But a casual inbreeding was beginning to have deleterious effects on some of the oldest families.† (source)

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Adding your signature to an innocuous looking contract can have deleterious long-term implications.

Although the value of acclimatizing as high as 26,000 feet is debatable (the deleterious effects of spending extra time at such extreme altitude may well offset the benefits), there is little question that extending the current eight- or nine-night acclimatization period at 21,000 to 24,000 feet would provide a greater margin of safety, thoroughly on our guides-was now suddenly and utterly without leadership: Rob and Andy were gone, and although Groom was present, the ordeal of the…† (source) Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, 1997

Now, as a proof of my susceptibility to atmosphere, here, as I come into my room, and turn on the light, and see the sheet of paper, the table, my gown lying negligently over the back of the chair, I feel that I am that dashing yet reflective man, that bold and deleterious figure, who, lightly throwing off his cloak, seizes his pen and at once flings off the following letter to the girl with whom he is passionately in love.† (source) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

It's deleterious to a basic human love of life—let me explain what I mean.† (source) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924

Hans Castorp kept his tobacco away from the deleterious effects of the house's steam heat by storing it in the cellar, and every morning he would descend to provide his cigar case with its daily ration.† (source) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924

He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on finding out the deleterious ingredients of every dish and diverted from this care only by the sound of his wife's voice.† (source) Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, 1905

He was twenty years old at the time, and three years later, thanks to a deleterious climate and intellectual exertion, his inherited illness had advanced to the point where a further stay would have been fatal.† (source) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924

And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the alert to find out improvements.† (source) Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1856

Or might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch?† (source)

These he cultivates with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world withal.† (source)

The Captain continued that deleterious amusement of smoking, long after the inn and the street were gone to bed.† (source)

It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.† (source) O. Henry, The Ransom of Red Chief, 1910
standard prefix: The prefix "un-" in undeleterious means not and reverses the meaning of deleterious. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.

External distractions have a deleterious effect on the ramified scores.† (source)

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deleteriousin a sentence