Definitions For Mattoid

Noun

MATTOID (plural MATTOIDs) A person who displays such behaviour; a person of congenitally abnormal mind bordering on insanity or degeneracy. Compound of genius and fool. {{rfex, en}}

Adjective

Displaying erratic behaviour

Etymology

From {{etyl, it, en}} matto, , insane + -oid, , likeness or resemblance, from (Ancient Greek)  εἶδος, , form {{rel-top, more}} First appeared in English in 1891 through a translation of the nineteenth-century Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's work, Man of Genius. H G Wells used it in several of his books, most notably in Mankind in the Making of 1903, in which he derides the theories of Lombroso and the Victorian phrenologists: “Among such theorists none at present are in quite such urgent need of polemical suppression as those who would persuade the heedless general reader that every social failure is necessarily a ‘degenerate’, and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly evil and mischievous strain in that unfortunate miscellany which constitutes ‘the criminal class’... These mattoid scientists make a direct and disastrous attack upon the latent self-respect of criminals.” {{rel-bottom}}