noun

• 1mass noun Redwater fever or a similar infectious disease affecting cattle or other animals.

• 2archaic A plague, epidemic, or crop blight.

  ‘There were great murrains, or diseases, of sheep and cattle, which meant that the animals all died, adding to the misery of the starving people.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The more mystically-minded clerics and chroniclers may have been confounded in their dire predictions of murrains, pestilence, and the imminent Second Coming.’
  • ‘He told him of the plague of the first born, of darkness, of hail and birds, lice, frogs, flies, the plague of blood, the plague of murrain - one plague for each day.’
  • ‘Crop failures in 1315, 1316, and 1321, largely due to exceptionally wet summers, overlapped with catastrophic losses of animals as disease - ‘murrain’ - devastated the nation's sheep flocks between 1313 and 1317 and its cattle 1319-21.’

  Synonyms

  disease, sickness

  1. 2.1The potato blight during the Irish famine in the mid 19th century.