Word.ws English Dictionary

white pill

white pill noun: a philosophical dilemma in which someone who faces death or disability at a certain probability is offered a perfect antidote if they pay a specified amount of money.

Noun

white pill (plural white pills)

  1. (attributive, often) A philosophical dilemma in which someone who faces death or disability at a certain probability is offered a perfect antidote if they pay a specified amount of money.
    • Now that we have both the black pill and white pill results before us, we are in a position to make a few general observations.1979, Ronald A. Howard, Life and death decision analysis, page 17
    • We can also think of selling risks of being disabled. Suppose that a person facing a risk p of being disabled to level f could avoid that risk for a payment x. How much should he pay? We call this the disability white pill question and diagram it as shown in Figure 6.1984, Management Science - Volume 30, page 414
    Antonyms:
    black pill
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see white, pill.

Examples of white pill in a sentence

  • Howard [1984] bases his analysis on a "black pill” and a "white pill."1986, Robert E. Machol, “How much safety?”, in Interfaces, volume 16, number 6:
  • While most people find the formulation of the white pill problem to be perfectly acceptable, many find the black pill problem to be very objectionable.2017, M. Granger Morgan, Theory and Practice in Policy Analysis, →ISBN, page 124:

Antonyms of white pill

Forms of white pill

pluralwhite pills

Questions about white pill

What does white pill mean?
White pill means a philosophical dilemma in which someone who faces death or disability at a certain probability is offered a perfect antidote if they pay a specified amount of money.
How do you use white pill in a sentence?
Howard [1984] bases his analysis on a "black pill” and a "white pill."
What part of speech is white pill?
White pill is a noun.
What is the plural of white pill?
The plural of white pill is white pills.

Words near white pill in the dictionary

  1. white picket fences
  2. white pickle
  3. white pie
  4. white pies
  5. White Pigeon
  6. white pill
  7. white pills
  8. white pine
  9. White Pine County
  10. white pines
  11. white pizza

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: white pill (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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