- healthy
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Analogous words: &Contrasted words: see those at HEALTHFUL2 Healthy, sound, wholesome, robust, hale, well are comparable when meaning having or manifesting health of mind or body or indicative of such health.Healthy may imply the possession of full vigor and strength of body or mind or it may merely imply freedom from signs of disease or abnormality{
a healthy body
}{a healthy boy
}{during a healthy and active life— Eliot
}Often the term applies not to one having health but to what manifests one's health or vigor or serves as a sign of it{he had a healthy color in his cheeks— Dickens
}{she has a healthy appetite
}{a healthy craving for the sap and savor of a more personal, national art— Binyon
}{in healthy reaction to the romantic fustian of the ... nineteenth century— Christopher Fry
}Sound even more strongly implies the possession of perfect health or the absence of all defects and therefore suggests not even the slightest sign of disease or of physical weakness or defect{a sound mind in a sound body
}{that child is . . . much too emotional to be ever really sound— Conrad
}{his tastes were healthy, his wits sound— Rose Macaulay
}Wholesome (see also HEALTHFUL) implies a healthiness that impresses others favorably, especially as indicative of a person's physical, mental, and moral soundness or often more specifically of a person's balance or equilibrium{thankful . . . that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome— D. H. Lawrence
}{such studies . . . promote ... a wholesome dislike of sophistry and rhetoric— Inge
}{her eyes shining, her face aglow, looking oddly wholesome in a smeared white painter's smock— Wouk
}Robust implies the antithesis of all that is delicate; it usually connotes manifest vigor of health as shown in muscularity, fresh color, a strong voice, and an ability to work long and hard{exercise tends to develop robust boys and girls
}{a hearty, robust man in his middle sixties— Mannix
}{he is in robust health
}{speak in a robust voice
}Hale, which is a close synonym of sound, is applied chiefly to elderly or aged persons who not only show no signs of infirmity or senility but manifest qualities of men in their prime{he is hale and hearty at 85
}{Pete Gurney was a lusty cock turned sixty-three, but bright and hale— Masefield
}Well, which is commoner as a predicative than as an attributive adjective, is a rather noncommittal term; it implies freedom from disease or illness but does not necessarily suggest soundness or robustness{is your father well?
}{he is always well
}{she has never been a well person
}{however ill one has been, he can (usually) get better, and keep getting better—he can get well— Menninger
}Antonyms: unhealthyContrasted words: infirm, frail, feeble, *weak
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
