Prescription

How to spell prescription

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce prescription

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does prescription mean?

1. nounA written instruction from a doctor authorising a patient to be supplied with a medicine.
2. nounAn authoritative recommendation or rule about how something should be done.

Prescription in a sentence

• The pharmacist could not fill the prescription without a signature from the doctor.

• The report offered a clear prescription for reforming the failing department.

• She dropped off her prescription at the chemist on the way home from the clinic.

• His management style follows a rigid prescription that allows little flexibility.

Where does prescription come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin praescriptio, a noun meaning 'a writing before' or 'a heading', built from the verb praescribere. That verb joins prae, meaning 'before' or 'in front', with scribere, meaning 'to write', so the literal idea was to write something at the front, as a heading or a directive set down in advance. In Roman law it came to mean a limitation or rule established beforehand, and it still carries that legal sense of a right gained or lost through long-established use. English took the word through Old French in the late 1300s, and the familiar medical meaning, a written order from a doctor for medicine, grew up later as physicians literally wrote out instructions. The very same scribere root sits inside 'describe', 'script', and 'subscribe', and remembering that 'pre' means 'before' is the surest guard against the common slip of writing 'perscription'.

How the word is built

• pre- (before)
• script (from Latin scribere: to write)
• -ion (noun suffix)