Word.ws English Dictionary

purple heart

purple heart noun: the drug phenobarbitone when taken recreationally.

Noun (1)

purple heart (plural purple hearts)

  1. The drug phenobarbitone when taken recreationally.
  2. (historical, slang) A drinamyl tablet when taken recreationally, popular in the 1960s.
    • Detective Peter Goodall said the source of the tablets had not been traced. "Purple heart" or drinamyl tablets, were a stimulant drug and habit-forming.1963 March 27, “Drug pills eaten like sweets, says detective”, in The Guardian
    • And every penny she had / Was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes1972, Ray Davies, “Big Black Smoke”, performed by The Kinks

Noun (2) capitalized: Purple Heart

Purple Heart (plural Purple Hearts)

  1. (US) A US military decoration awarded in the name of the President of the United States to those wounded or killed while serving on or after 5 April 1917.

Forms of purple heart

pluralpurple hearts
pluralPurple Hearts

Origin of purple heart

From the color of the pills.

Questions about purple heart

What does purple heart mean?
Purple heart means the drug phenobarbitone when taken recreationally.
What part of speech is purple heart?
Purple heart is a noun.
What is the plural of purple heart?
The plural of purple heart is purple hearts.

Words near purple heart in the dictionary

  1. purple hairstreaks
  2. purple hat therapies
  3. purple hat therapy
  4. Purple Hawke
  5. purple haze
  6. purple heart
  7. purple hearts
  8. purple helmet
  9. purple helmets
  10. purple heron
  11. purple herons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: purple heart (page history and authors); Purple Heart (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-purple heart.wav.

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