Placebo

How to spell placebo

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce placebo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does placebo mean?

1. nounA harmless substance with no active medicine, given as a control in a trial or to satisfy a patient.

Placebo in a sentence

• Half of the volunteers received the new drug and half received a placebo.

• The patient improved even though the tablet was only a placebo.

Where does placebo come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Placebo is a complete Latin word meaning 'I shall please', the future tense of the verb placere, which meant 'to please' or 'to be acceptable'. In the Middle Ages it opened the Latin vespers for the dead (Placebo Domino, 'I shall please the Lord'), and because professional mourners were sometimes hired to chant these words, 'to sing placebo' came to mean a flattering, insincere attempt to please. By the late 1700s English medicine had borrowed the term for a treatment given more to satisfy the patient than to cure, since a doctor offering one was effectively trying to please rather than to heal. The modern scientific sense, an inactive substance used as a control in trials, grew from that medical use in the twentieth century. The same placere root survives in everyday words like 'pleasant', 'please', and 'placid', and the unusual -ebo ending is the spelling trap, since the word looks Spanish or Italian but is pure Latin.

How the word is built

• placebo (Latin: 'I shall please', from placere 'to please'
• -bo future-tense ending)