hypercapnea

English

Noun

hypercapnea

1. (medicine) Misspelling of hypercapnia.

Usage notes

The spellings "hypercapnea" and "hypocapnea" are occasionally seen in published medical articles (46 results and 5 results, respectively, in a PubMed search in 2021), but they are not entered in major dictionaries and are not tied to any etymology that involves the -pnea ("breathing") suffix. They are misspellings by writers who misunderstand that the words hypercapnia and hypocapnia do not end in the same suffix that the words apnea, hypopnea, and hyperpnea end in. In contrast, the -capn- syllable of the words comes from Ancient Greek καπνός (kapnós, “smoke”).