The Collaborative International Dictionary
Evil \E"vil\ ([=e]"v'l) n.
-
Anything which impairs the happiness of a being or deprives a being of any good; anything which causes suffering of any kind to sentient beings; injury; mischief; harm; -- opposed to good.
Evils which our own misdeeds have wrought.
--Milton.The evil that men do lives after them.
--Shak. -
Moral badness, or the deviation of a moral being from the principles of virtue imposed by conscience, or by the will of the Supreme Being, or by the principles of a lawful human authority; disposition to do wrong; moral offence; wickedness; depravity.
The heart of the sons of men is full of evil.
--Eccl. ix. -
3. malady or disease; especially in the phrase king's evil, the scrofula. [R.]
--Shak.He [Edward the Confessor] was the first that touched for the evil.
--Addison.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"scrofula," late 14c., translates Medieval Latin regius morbus; so called because the kings of England and France claimed to heal it by their touch. In England, the custom dates from Edward the Confessor and was continued through the Stuarts (Charles II touched 90,798 sufferers) but was ended by the Hanoverians (1714).
Wiktionary
n. (context archaic English) scrofula
WordNet
Usage examples of "king's evil".
Wallace, fiercely intelligent but ever sickly, had died of the falling sickness, sometimes called king's evil.
A few more months around the King's evil and you'd have been changed forever.
In that disease, once called 'King's Evil,' the gene is recessive in the female and is carried harmlessly.
Scrofula, a kind of tuberculosis, was in England called the 'King's evil', and was supposedly curable only by the King's touch.