Word.ws English Dictionary

polypharmacy

polypharmacy noun: the use of multiple drugs to treat multiple concurrent disorders in the same (now especially elderly) patient, chiefly with connotations of indiscriminate or excessive prescription (involving overmedication and overprescription).

Noun

polypharmacy (uncountable)

  1. The use of multiple drugs to treat multiple concurrent disorders in the same (now especially elderly) patient, chiefly with connotations of indiscriminate or excessive prescription (involving overmedication and overprescription).
    • Critics denounced physicians as meddlesome, capriciously practising an often dangerous polypharmacy – a blunderbuss approach.1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 226
    • Faced with wheezing, blue-faced patients, they felt they had to do something, and the approach they adopted was polypragmatism, or polypharmacy: they threw the medicine cabinet at the problem.2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, →ISBN

polypharmacy meaning in Tamil

polypharmacy in Tamil

பலமருந்துச் சிகிச்சை

Origin of polypharmacy

From poly- + pharmacy, after Ancient Greek πολυφάρμακος (poluphármakos).

Words formed from polypharmacy

Questions about polypharmacy

What does polypharmacy mean?
Polypharmacy means the use of multiple drugs to treat multiple concurrent disorders in the same (now especially elderly) patient, chiefly with connotations of indiscriminate or excessive prescription (involving overmedication and overprescription).
What is polypharmacy in Tamil?
Polypharmacy in Tamil is பலமருந்துச் சிகிச்சை. See Polypharmacy meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is polypharmacy?
Polypharmacy is a noun.

Words near polypharmacy in the dictionary

  1. polypharmacological
  2. polypharmacologically
  3. polypharmacologies
  4. polypharmacology
  5. polypharmacotherapy
  6. polypharmacy
  7. polypharyngeal
  8. polyphasal
  9. polyphase
  10. polyphase circuit
  11. polyphase circuits

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polypharmacy (page history and authors); polypharmacy (Tamil Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-polypharmacy.wav.

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