Word.ws English Dictionary

orphan drugs

orphan drugs is the plural of orphan drug.

Meaning of orphan drug

Noun

orphan drug (plural orphan drugs)

  1. A medicinal drug which is effective in the treatment of some disease(s), but which is not manufactured or marketed because the demand is insufficient to cover the costs of supply.
    • Tragically, her disease is so rare that the only effective medicine is an orphan drug.
  2. (US) A drug as defined under the Orphan Drug Act (1983).

Questions about orphan drugs

What is orphan drugs the plural of?
Orphan drugs is the plural of orphan drug.

Words near orphan drugs in the dictionary

  1. orphan crushing machine
  2. orphan crushing machines
  3. orphan disease
  4. orphan diseases
  5. orphan drug
  6. orphan drugs
  7. orphan house
  8. orphan houses
  9. orphan initialism
  10. orphan initialisms
  11. orphan John

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: orphan drugs (page history and authors); orphan drug (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.

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Cite this entry: “orphan drugs.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/orphan_drugs. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.