rash
Definitions
General English
- adjective done without thinking carefully or sensibly
- noun a mass of red spots on your skin, which stays for a time and then disappears
Medical
Slang
- adjective wonderful. A term of high appreciation among American teenagers and aficionados of hip hop in the 1980s. It is nearly always expressed as ‘totally rash’ and was coined on the lines of wild, bad, wicked, etc.
Origin & History of “rash”
English has two words rash. The older, ‘impetuous’ (14th c.), probably comes from an unrecorded Old English *ræsc, which together with its relatives German rasch ‘quick’ and Swedish rask ‘active, vigorous’ goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *raskuz. this was probably derived from the same base as produced English rather, which originally meant ‘more quickly’. Rash ‘skin condition’ (18th c.) may have been borrowed from the now obsolete French rache, a descendant of Old French rasche, whose Old Northern French counterpart *rasque is the possible source of English rascal.
