Relating to or characterized by caries; subject to or affected by decay or rot.
From Latin 'caries' with adjectival suffix '-en' or '-ian'. This archaic or regional variant appears in older medical and biological texts.
This is an older way of saying 'relating to decay,' and it shows how English borrowed medical vocabulary from Latin, then created different versions of the same root word for different contexts—kind of like how we have 'rotate,' 'rotary,' and 'rotund.'
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