Word.ws English Dictionary

short-acting

short-acting adjective: having a pharmaceutical effect principally in the short term.

Adjective

short-acting (comparative shorter-acting, superlative shortest-acting)

  1. Having a pharmaceutical effect principally in the short term.
    • Short-acting insulin is maximally effective for one to three hours.
    • I have tried all the medium and short acting non-barbiturate sedatives since the war (including thalidomide) but they don’t work and I don’t trust the newfangled long acting, “safe” analgesics.1988, E[dward] J[ames] Moran Campbell, Not Always on the Level, [London]: British Medical Journal, →ISBN, page 194
    Antonyms:
    long-acting

Antonyms of short-acting

Forms of short-acting

comparativeshorter-acting
superlativeshortest-acting

Questions about short-acting

What does short-acting mean?
Short-acting means having a pharmaceutical effect principally in the short term.
What part of speech is short-acting?
Short-acting is an adjective.

Words near short-acting in the dictionary

  1. short vowels
  2. short wave
  3. short waves
  4. short weight
  5. short whist
  6. short-acting
  7. short-answer
  8. short-answers
  9. short-arse
  10. short-arses
  11. short-ass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: short-acting (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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