Noun

1. A period in human life in which some great change is supposed to take place in the constitution. The critical periods are thought by some to be the years produced by multiplying 7 into the odd numbers 3, 5, 7, and 9; to which others add the 81st year.
2. The period of life that marks the end of the reproductive capacity of a woman and the beginning of the menopause; the change of life
3. A critical stage or decisive point; a crisis
4. Grand or Great climacteric, the sixty-third year of human life.
   • Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since, p. 66-67.

     [H]e was in his grand climacterick, with a florid brow, and a step like youthful agility. Sigourney, Lydia.

   • Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France., p. 52.

     I should hardly yield my rigid fibers to be regenerated by them; nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.