Drug

How to spell drug

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drug

What does drug mean?

1. nounA substance used as a medicine or taken for its effect on the body or mind.
2. verbTo give someone a substance, often secretly, to make them sleepy or unconscious.

Drug in a sentence

• noun

  The pharmacist explained how the new drug should be stored.

• verb

  The novel's villain tried to drug a guard with a spiked drink.

• noun

  Researchers tested the drug against a placebo for six months.

• verb

  Vets sometimes drug an anxious animal before a long flight.

Where does drug come from?

Language of origin: French

The word entered English in the late 1300s from the Old French 'drogue', meaning a medicinal ingredient or supply, and the related 'droguerie' for a stock of such ingredients. Beyond Old French the trail goes cold: one widely cited idea links it to the Middle Dutch or Low German 'droge vate', literally 'dry barrels', because the dried herbs and spices that pharmacists used were shipped and stored in casks, and the label for the container may have transferred to the goods inside. From the original sense of a substance used in medicine, the meaning broadened to cover chemicals taken for their effect on the body and, by the twentieth century, narcotics and substances of abuse. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, and the only mild trap is that the short 'u' sound could tempt a misspelling like 'drugg', though the single 'g' holds in the base form. Because the deeper origin really is debated, etymologists tend to flag it as uncertain rather than settle on one tidy story.

How the word is built

• drug (single root; from Old French drogue, of uncertain earlier origin)