Aspirin

How to spell aspirin

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce aspirin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does aspirin mean?

1. nounA common medicine taken to relieve pain, lower fever, or reduce inflammation, and sometimes used in low doses to thin the blood.

Aspirin in a sentence

• She took an aspirin to ease the dull headache before the meeting.

• His doctor recommended a daily low-dose aspirin to protect his heart.

Where does aspirin come from?

Language of origin: Other

Aspirin began life as a brand name registered by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer in 1899. The chemists built the name from three pieces: the 'a' stands for the acetyl group added during manufacture, the 'spir' nods to Spiraea, the botanical genus of meadowsweet from which related salicylic compounds were first obtained, and '-in' is a standard suffix for naming chemical substances. The Spiraea name itself traces back through scientific Latin to the Greek 'speira', meaning a coil or wreath, a reference to the plant's curling seed pods. The trademark was so successful that in many countries the word lost its capital letter and became an ordinary noun for the painkiller. For spellers the quiet trap is the single, unstressed middle, since the 'pir' is barely sounded and is easy to overdo or misorder.

How the word is built

• a- (from acetyl)
• spir (from Spiraea, the meadowsweet plant)
• -in (chemical product suffix)