An archaic or variant spelling of deleterious, meaning harmful or damaging.
A less common variant of deleterious, likely influenced by similar adjective formations with -ery suffixes. This spelling is largely obsolete, replaced by the more standard deleterious in modern English.
Deletery represents a fork in English's evolutionary path—it's the road not taken, a suffix combination that seemed promising but lost out to deleterious in the competition for standardization.
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