Synonyms:
catching, contracting
Meaning: becoming infected; "catching cold is sometimes unavoidable"; "the contracting of a serious illness can be financially catastrophic"
Usage examples
Made a last effort to overcome his poverty by getting the arrears of his salary paid at Prague, but was unsuccessful, and, contracting brain fever on the journey, died in November, 1630, aged 59.
Now there is nothing particularly frightful about a pair of bellows, however large it may be, and yet the recollection of that huge structure of leather and wood, with the great iron nose projecting from the contracting cheeks of it, at the head of the old woman's bed, so capable yet so useless, did return upon me with terror in the dusk of that lonely night.
Two-thirds of Germany's property was destroyed and 18,000,000 of her citizens were killed, because men quarrelled about the way to glorify "The Prince of Peace." Marching through rain and snow, sleeping on the ground, eating stale food or starving, contracting diseases and facing guns that fire six hundred times a minute, for fifty cents a day--this is the soldier's life.
The treaty, at the same time, regulated the number of troops and the military details of the war on behalf of the two contracting powers, and it provided for divers political incidents which might be entailed, and to which the alliance thus concluded should or should not be applicable according to the special stipulations which were drawn up with a view to those very incidents.