underdose
underdose noun: an inadequate dose (of a medication).
Noun
underdose (plural underdoses)
- An inadequate dose (of a medication).
- “[…] I put laudanum in his coffee last night. I was afraid to put in too much for fear of killing him, so I suppose I didn’t put in enough, for he laid wide awake all night.”
“Ah, yes! that would be the effect of an under-dose of laudanum.”1871, E. D. E. N. Southworth, chapter 31, in Cruel as the Grave, Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Bros, page 333 - If Patrick were to add a little sugar to her urine specimen so that she would take a hefty dose of insulin, and then to make her take a good walk without her little tin of glucose […] she would probably pass out on the mountainside. Or suppose he substituted his own urine in the test tube so that...1960, Muriel Spark, chapter 7, in The Bachelors, London: Macmillan
- “[…] I put laudanum in his coffee last night. I was afraid to put in too much for fear of killing him, so I suppose I didn’t put in enough, for he laid wide awake all night.”
- An inadequate amount of something.
- “Seems as though sometimes I get an overdose of feeling, and an underdose of sense.”1955, Jim Kjelgaard, chapter 8, in The Lost Wagon, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co
- It seems the kid suffers from an underdose of mother love, so he kills pretty girls—exactly the problem of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”1979 September 21, Tom Shales, “‘Eischied’ Walks Tall”, in The Washington Post
Verb
underdose (third-person singular simple present underdoses, present participle underdosing, simple past and past participle underdosed)
- To administer an inadequate dose (to someone or to oneself).
- The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.1945, Alexander Fleming, Nobel acceptance speech, cited in Jenny Rohn, “The hunt is on for new antibiotics—but we have to start looking outside the lab,” The Guardian, 19 February, 2015
- It is true that insulin costs are high; as a result some patients may underdose. We need better reimbursement to address that.2016, Kelly Close, letter to the editor, The New York Times, 29 February, 2016
- To administer an inadequate dose of (a medication).
- […] a Child new-born may take an eighth or tenth part of a paper, a Child of a year old a quarter of a paper or a sixth part, 2, 3, or 4 years old a third 5, 6, 7, half a paper, &c. for you cannot hurt if you over or under dose it a little; the Medicine being safe.1679, Richard Fletcher, “Directions for the Use of that Excellent Medicine Fletcher’s Powder”, in The Vertues of that Well-Known and Often Experienced Medicine Fletcher’s Powder, London, page 6
- An intern underdosed her heparin (blood thinner), and she suffered a large blood clot in a lung.2013 July 26, Judy Mandell, “‘Critically Ill’ author Frederick Southwick on what ails our healthcare system”, in Los Angeles Times
- To use a scant or inadequate amount of an ingredient or product.
- My advice is to slightly under-dose on the whiskey in Delia’s recipe, who I imagine went for a rather better bottle than I did.2016 November 4, Stephen Bush, “Delia’s Christmas cake recipe takes a little bit of practice”, in The Guardian
Antonyms of underdose
Forms of underdose
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | underdoses |
| alternative form | under-dose |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | underdoses |
| present participle | underdosing |
| past participle | underdosed |
| past | underdosed |
Origin of underdose
From under- + dose, by analogy with overdose.
Questions about underdose
- What does underdose mean?
- Underdose means an inadequate dose (of a medication).
- What part of speech is underdose?
- Underdose can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of underdose?
- The plural of underdose is underdoses.
Words near underdose in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: underdose (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-underdose.wav.
Cite this entry: “underdose.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/underdose. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.