theriac

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The Word of the Day for April 18 is:
theriac   \THEER-ee-ak\   noun
     1 : a mixture of many drugs and honey formerly held to be an antidote to 
poison 
    *2 : cure-all

Example sentence:
     Garlic has been called the poor man's theriac.

Did you know?
     There really is no such thing as a single remedy for all that ails us. But 
that hasn't kept English speakers from creating, not just a single word, but 
several words, that mean "cure-all" -- "catholicon," "elixir," "nostrum," 
"panacea," and today's word, "theriac." When we first used "theriac," it meant 
"an antidote for poison" -- for any and all poisons, that is. That's how our 
Roman and Greek forebears used their "theriaca" and "theriake," which derive 
ultimately from the Greek word for "wild animal." The first theriac was 
supposedly created by the first-century Greek physician Andromachus, whose 
concoction consisted of some 70 drugs pulverized with honey. Medieval 
physicians created even more elaborate theriacs to dose a plague-dreading 
populace, for whom the possibility of a cure-all didn't seem too wild a notion 
at all.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.



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