panacea means the goddess/personification of healing, remedies, cures and panaceas (medicines, salves, ointments and other curatives). She is a daughter of Asclepius and Epione. It carries an Arena rating of 1850, earned across 13 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, panacea ranks #68 of 42,749 for Qualifying, #192 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #218 of 17,104 for Most Storied Words, #423 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words.
panacea is pronounced /ˌpæn.əˈsiː.ə/.
Why “panacea” is a great word
A remedy or solution believed to cure all diseases or solve all problems. From Latin panacēa, from Greek panákeia ("cure-all"), from panakēs ("all-healing"), from pan- ("all") + akos ("cure"). First recorded in English 1540–50. Unlike "elixir," which denotes a specific, often alchemical potion for eternal life, or "palliative," which offers mere relief without a cure, panacea is the audacious dream of totality. It is the shimmering promise in a patent-medicine bottle, the politician's single policy promised to mend every fracture, the quiet hope that one conversation might heal an old estrangement—the beautiful, brutal conviction that the irreducible complexity of life can be outmatched by a single, simple truth.
Etymology
From Ancient Greek Πανακεια (Panakeia, literally “all-curing”).
name
- The goddess/personification of healing, remedies, cures and panaceas (medicines, salves, ointments and other curatives). She is a daughter of Asclepius and Epione.
noun
- A remedy believed to cure all disease and prolong life that was originally sought by alchemists; a cure-all.
- A solution to all problems.e.g.“A monorail will be a panacea for our traffic woes.”
- The plant allheal (Valeriana officinalis), believed to cure all ills.e.g.“There, whether it diuine Tobacco were, / Or Panachæa, or Polygony, / She found, and brought it to her patient deare […]” — 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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