yellow fever

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

yellow fever (uncountable)

1. An acute febrile illness of tropical regions, caused by a flavivirus (Yellow fever virus) and spread by certain mosquitoes, characterised by jaundice, black vomit and the absence of urination.

   Synonyms: (obsolete) black vomit, (obsolete) yellow jack, (obsolete) Bulam fever

   • 2016, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, Fleet (2017), page 257:

     The town up the road was overcome by yellow fever, he said. All travelers warned away.

2. (slang) An attraction to ethnically East Asian men or women, expressed by non-East Asian (especially white European male) people.

   Synonym: Asian fever

   Hyponym: Japanese fever

3. (dated) A lust for gold; an obsession with seeking gold ore.

   Synonym: gold fever

   • 1910, Giacomo Puccini, La Fanciulla Del West: The Girl of the Golden West:

     He's got the yellow fever; Once get the sight of gold and you are poisoned.

   • 1951, George Peter Hammond, The Larkin Papers, Univ of California Press:

     An onze a day, two a day, or three—every one has the gold or yellow fever. Last night several of the most respectible American residents of this town arrived home from a visit to the gold regions.

   • 1963, Robert Raine Geyer, Death Trails in Bolivia to Faith Triumphant:

     But the true yellow fever that has abounded in the lower gold-bearing valleys around Guanay can possibly illustrate in sickness what takes place in actuality among the sons of men who are seduced by the lust for gold.

   • 2000 October 10, W. Jacobson, Dickens and the Children of Empire, Springer, →ISBN, pages 68–69:

     In the stories he wrote and published about the gold rush, Dickens does not resolve characters' feelings of class resentment so much as explain them in non-political terms […] Dickens spreads this strain of 'yellow fever' among his characters, making their labour unrest seem both understandable and pathological.

• yellow-fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti)

• Jonathon Green (2024) “yellow fever n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang