Dispensary

How to spell dispensary

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce dispensary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dispensary mean?

1. nounA place, often within a hospital or clinic, where medicines are prepared and handed out.

Dispensary in a sentence

• The hospital dispensary was busy filling prescriptions all morning.

• She collected her tablets from the dispensary before leaving the clinic.

Where does dispensary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb dispensare, meaning 'to weigh out' or 'to distribute', which was a repeated-action form of dispendere, built from dis- 'out, apart' and pendere 'to weigh'. In Roman times money and goods were literally weighed when they were handed out, so the root carries the sense of careful measured distribution, a notion that survives in relatives such as 'dispense', 'expense', and even 'pension'. By the medieval period Latin had formed dispensarium for a place where things were dispensed, and English adopted the word in the early 1600s, settling it firmly on places that handed out medicines. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the ending: the sound is a soft 's', not 'c', and the final syllable is the unstressed '-ary' rather than '-ery'. Remembering that it shares its 'pens' core with 'dispense' keeps both the 's' and the 'pens' spelling secure.

How the word is built

• dis- (out, apart)
• pens (from pendere/pensare: to weigh, pay out)
• -ary (place for)