black pill
black pill noun: an opium pill.
Noun
black pill (plural black pills)
- An opium pill.
- Those funny pipes were used for opium-smoking — just a puff for each shining black pill, and then oblivion to all earthly cares — dreams and dreams of beautiful worlds.1904, The Reader: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine - Volume 4, page 369
- I knew a girl-a black pill freak, strung out on the black pills, . . .1972 Fall, Robert Schultheis, “The Fabulist: Gods of America”, in The North American Review, volume 257, number 3
- A poison pill; a pill intended to kill the person who ingests it.
- He says conditions got worse as time went along and at different times she threatened to give him a black pill, that he asked her what this meant and she said "that was the way women had of getting rid of husbands when they didn't want them any more."1942, Fayette Legal Journal - Volume 5, page 252
- The day I got into med school my mother told me that if she were ever to find herself without her mental faculties that I should give her the "black pill."2009, Bruce Wilson, “Doing death better”, in American Heart Hospital Journal
- A hypothetical pill with a specific probability of causing death, which one is offered a large sum of money in order to take, as a philosophical dilemma.
- Now that we have both the black pill and white pill results before us, we are in a position to make a few general observations.1979, Ronald A. Howard, Life and death decision analysis, page 17
- But to me both characters in the black pill example were immoral in Kant's sense: the person who made the offer and the person who accepted it (to accept the offer of deliberately running a risk of death for dollars gain is treating humanity in yourself as a means only, whether or not you agree, or...1980, C. West Churchman, “Symposium Summary the Safety Profession's Image of Humanity”, in Societal Risk Assessment,, →ISBN
- Antonyms:
- white pill
- A traditional Tibetan remedy.
- However, disquiet has been voiced recently about how "natural" certain forms of traditional Buddhist medicine are - notably the Tibetan "black pill" - some recipes for which specify rhinoceros horn and bear-bile among the ingredients (Leland, 1995).1995, James J Hughes, Damien Keown, “Buddhism and Medical Ethics: A Bibliographic Introduction”, in Journal of Buddhist ethics, volume 2
- This great precious Cold Compound Black Pill contains more than one hundred ingredients, including the metals, gold, silver, copper, and iron, the precious stones sapphire, emerald, turquiose, ruby, and all in detoxified from and a great number of herbal ingredient, including Crocus sativus L....2001, Jürgen C. Aschoff, Tashi Yangphel Tashigang, Tibetan "precious Pills", the Rinchen Medicine
- A notional pill taken by those who have adopted a nihilistic, usually (but not necessarily) far-right philosophy, or those who are pessimistic about social or political issues.
- Once an individual had accessed this page they would be directed to a number of stories that described other candidates, in this case Fillon and Macron, as crooked, and also described French democracy as a broken system (the 'black pill' content).2018, Jacob Davey, Erin Marie Saltman, Jonathan Birdwell, “The mainstreaming of far-right extremism online and how to counter it: a case study on UK, US and French election”, in Trumping the...
- They see a dangerous trend in the incel movement: “The spreading of the blackpill would no doubt increase shooting (and suicides) because some young men lose control”.2019 November, Sylvia Jaki et al., “Online Hatred of Women in the Incels.me Forum: Linguistic Analysis and Automatic Detection”, in Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, volume 7, number 2...
- The belief that genetics and appearance (as defined by LMS and PSL theory) determine one's destiny and that effort (especially regarding the sexual marketplace) is futile.
- The first way forum posters express how they deal with depression is through the term “LDAR” or “lay down and rot”. This phrase follows the logic of the blackpill that life is hopeless for incels due to their inability to reach stereotypical standards of masculinity.2020, Anne Jones, Incels and the Manosphere: Tracking Men's Movements Online (thesis submitted to the University of Central Florida), page 67
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see black, pill.
Verb
black pill (third-person singular simple present black pills, present participle black pilling, simple past and past participle black pilled)
- To cause another to adopt a nihilistic philosophy.
- And finally, to be 'black-pilled' is to take pleasure in the end of existence, to philosophise from a perspective of our technological demise, and to embrace the singular bleakness of a meaningless world.2019, Emile Frankel, Hearing the Cloud: Can Music Help Reimagine The Future?, unnumbered page
- Yet some of the most high-profile men in the alt-right are dismayed by the manosphere's hostility, worried that it has become rife with young men who have been black pilled, turned into angry nihilists who might become homicidal or suicidal incels.2019, Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination, page 97
- To accept that genetics and appearance (as defined by LMS and PSL theory) determine one's destiny and that effort (especially regarding the sexual marketplace) is futile.
- Incels are a danger to western society, because if we manage to blackpill more low value men, it could destroy this rotten civilization in its current form.2020, anonymous, quoted in Angus Charles Lindsay, "Swallowing the Black Pill: A Qualitative Exploration of Incel Antifeminism within Digital Society", thesis submitted to Victoria University of...
Proper noun capitalized: Black Pill
Black Pill
- A suburb in Mumbles community, City and County of Swansea, Wales (OS grid ref SS6190).
- Another scheme for electrifying the Swansea & Mumbles also dates from 1898, and was connected with the proposal for the Gower Light Railway from Black Pill to Port Eynon, which came to nothing.1954 August, Charles E. Lee, “The Swansea & Mumbles Railway 150th Anniversary Celebrations”, in Railway Magazine, page 526
Examples of black pill in a sentence
- Each person requested one of the following - black pill, calomel and soda, puick, jallop and antimony wine.2004, Peggy Rankine, Busha Benjie:
- Desperately injured, sick, or miserable workers used the "black pill," an overdose of opium, to commit suicide.2005, Volney Steele, Bleed, Blister, and Purge:
- Howard [1984] bases his analysis on a "black pill” and a "white pill."1986, Robert E. Machol, “How much safety?”, in Interfaces, volume 16, number 6:
- As a useful thought experiment, we imagine an individual faced with what we call the black pill question.2013, Richard C. Schwing, Walter A. Albers, Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough?, →ISBN, page 92:
Antonyms of black pill
Forms of black pill
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | black pills |
| alternative form | black-pill |
| alternative form | blackpill |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | black pills |
| present participle | black pilling |
| past participle | black pilled |
| past | black pilled |
| Proper noun | |
| alternative form | Blackpill |
Origin of black pill
Nihilism sense influenced by preexisting red pill. See there for further explanation.
Words formed from black pill
Questions about black pill
- What does black pill mean?
- Black pill means an opium pill.
- How do you use black pill in a sentence?
- Each person requested one of the following - black pill, calomel and soda, puick, jallop and antimony wine.
- What part of speech is black pill?
- Black pill can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of black pill?
- The plural of black pill is black pills.
Words near black pill in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: black pill (page history and authors); Black Pill (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-black pill.wav.
Cite this entry: “black pill.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/black_pill. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.