prescription
Pluralprescriptions
- 1A written order from an authorized medical practitioner for the provision of medicine or another treatment, including the lens specifications for a pair of glasses.
The physician wrote a prescription for a two-week course of antibiotics.
She took her new glasses prescription to the optician down the street.
Note
The order on every pharmacy counter goes back to Latin praescriptio, "something written ahead of time," from prae- "before" and scribere "to write," the same pairing found in prescribe. Its shorthand is Rx or the symbol ℞, and scrip and forescript are synonyms. Eye care borrows the word for the lens figures a pair of glasses must match. Harry E. Wedeck's Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs (1961) stretches it to an old folk remedy.
- 2The medicine or course of treatment supplied in response to a practitioner's written order.
She had to refill her prescription before the long weekend.
The pharmacist handed over the prescription in a clearly labeled bottle.
Similarmedication, medicine
Note
Here the paper has become the pills. You pick up or refill a prescription, which makes sense only of what the pharmacist hands over, not of the doctor's written order. Letitia Elizabeth Landon plays on this in Lady Anne Granard (1838). In that novel a nurse arrives with "a receipt for a pudding" in one hand to make you ill and a prescription in the other to cure you.
- 3A recommended plan for treating or handling a problem; the course of action so recommended.
Like a doctor's advice, but applied to any kind of trouble rather than to illness.
The economist offered a familiar prescription for stagnant growth.
Patience and steady saving was her prescription for financial security.
Similarremedy, recipe, formula, cure, recommendation
Note
The medical frame carries over intact, which is why the word often travels with diagnosis. In A Moveable Feast (1964), Ernest Hemingway admits he "had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis." The usual construction is a prescription for something, such as a wounded spirit or a long life. It readily turns ironic, naming a remedy that produces the opposite of what it promises.
- 4A fixed time period within which a legal right must be exercised, after which it becomes void and can never be enforced.
The court dismissed the suit, holding that prescription had extinguished the plaintiff's right of action.
Many jurisdictions interrupt prescription when the creditor files a formal demand.
Similarlimitation
Note
Lawyers qualify this one as extinctive or liberative prescription, because it destroys a right rather than creating one. If the period runs without the holder acting, the claim is gone for good. Its mirror image is the ownership-by-use meaning, and the adjective is the quickest way to tell which is meant. In this sense prescription runs, can be interrupted, and extinguishes a right.
- 5A fixed time period after which someone who has used another's property openly, peacefully, and without interruption gains full ownership of it.
The neighbor claimed the disputed garden by prescription, having tended it openly for decades.
Civil codes allow ownership to pass by prescription only when possession has been peaceful and uninterrupted.
Note
Here time works the other way: instead of ending a right, the period creates one. That is why lawyers call it acquisitive prescription, or usucaption. The use must be uninterrupted, peaceful and public, and a claimant is said to hold land by prescription. Common-law systems reach a similar result under the name adverse possession.
- 6The act of formally establishing a law, regulation, or similar rule, especially in writing; a particular instance of doing so.
The prescription of the new tax code required months of legislative drafting.
Several prescriptions of trade regulation were issued during the reform.
Similarenactment
Oppositerepeal
Note
In legal writing the word names the laying down of a rule, and a statute's prescription is the rule it lays down. In this use it is close kin to enactment. Context separates it from the time-limit meaning, which concerns rights lapsing rather than rules being made. When a sentence is about drafting a law or justifying one, it points here.
- 7The act of establishing ideal norms for how language ought to be used, rather than describing how it actually is used; an instance of doing so.
The dictionary's editors leaned toward prescription, flagging disputed usages as outright errors.
Debates over the split infinitive show prescription clashing with everyday speech.
Similarprescriptivism
Oppositedescription, descriptivism
Note
Linguists use the word as one half of a pair: prescription against description. Prescription lays down how people ought to speak or write, while description records how they actually do. Keep it apart from the legal enactment sense. Both mean setting down rules, but this one governs only language, and its natural opposite is a record of usage rather than a lapse of law.
Less common meaning
- 8Self-restraint; the limiting of one's actions, especially in keeping with a moral code or social conventions.
There is an air of prescription about him which is always agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of tribute.
1852, Charles Dickens, Bleak HouseSimilarself-restraint
Note
The word has dropped out of this use and survives mainly in period writing. Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) gives a man "an air of prescription," a composed, convention-bound bearing that Sir Leicester receives as a kind of tribute. In modern prose, self-restraint says the same thing without being misread as a doctor's order or a legal term.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of prescription apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Borrowed through Middle French and Old French prescripcion from Latin praescriptio ("preface; pretext; something written ahead of time"), built from prae- ("before") plus scribere ("to write") and the noun-forming ending -tio. It is equivalent to prescribe plus -tion.