sick

ill, sick

Ill and sick share responsibilities in peculiar ways, and are not always interchangeable. To begin with, ill is more usually predicative (placed after a verb, as in She was ill), whereas sick occurs naturally in attributive position (before a noun, as in She was a sick woman) as well as predicatively (as in She was sick), and in compounds such as sick leave and sick room). Ill is used attributively only in the broader sense ‘out of health’ (He was an ill man when I last saw him), in the extended meanings ‘faulty, unskilful’ (ill judgement / ill management), in idioms and proverbs (do an ill turn to / It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good). It also occurs adverbially in compounds (ill-behaved / ill-considered). In BrE, to be sick and to feel sick have the special meanings ‘to vomit’ and ‘to be inclined to vomit’, and to underline the anomalies of the two words a person can look ill and then report (or go) sick. In varieties of English other than BrE, the overlaps in meaning and usage vary considerably, and in some varieties there is little difference other than the more formal nature of the word ill. In AmE, the meaning ‘vomiting’ is normally supplied by the phrase sick to (or at) one's stomach.