Word.ws English Dictionary

pothecary

pothecary is the obsolete form of apothecary.

Meaning of apothecary

Noun

apothecary (plural apothecaries)

  1. (archaic, dated) Synonym of pharmacist: a person who sells medicine, especially (historical) one who made and sold their own medicines in the medieval or early modern eras.
    • [T]he poticaries and barbarus wryters call it [the iris] Irios in the genetiue caſe.1562, Wylliam Turner [i.e., William Turner], “Of the Herbe Called in Latin Irio”, in The Second Parte of Guilliam Turners Herball⸝ […], Cologne: […] Arnold Birckman, →OCLC, folio 23, recto
    Synonyms:
    pharmacist
  2. (archaic, historical) Synonym of pharmacy: an apothecary's shop, a drugstore.
    • The Russian people as a whole almost revered the apothecary, and they entered it as they would enter a sanctum.1919, S.A., “Pharmacy in Russia”, in Soviet Russia, volume 1, number 27, page 6
    Synonyms:
    pharmacy
  3. (uncommon) A glass jar of the sort once used for storing medicine.

Forms of pothecary

pluralpothecaries

Questions about pothecary

What is pothecary the obsolete form of?
Pothecary is the obsolete form of apothecary.

Words near pothecary in the dictionary

  1. pothanger
  2. pothangers
  3. pothead
  4. potheads
  5. pothecaries
  6. pothecary
  7. potheen
  8. potheens
  9. pother
  10. potherb
  11. potherbs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pothecary (page history and authors); apothecary (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:

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