Definitions for placebo

• Definition
• Anagrams (202)

placebo pla·ce·bo

Spelling: [pluh-see-boh for 1; plah-chey-boh Placebo is a 7 letter English word. It's valid Scrabble word worth 13 points. It's valid Words with friends word worth 17 points.

You can make 202 anagrams from letters in placebo (abcelop).

Definitions for placebo

noun

1. Medicine/Medical, Pharmacology. a substance having no pharmacological effect but given merely to satisfy a patient who supposes it to be a medicine. a substance having no pharmacological effect but administered as a control in testing experimentally or clinically the efficacy of a biologically active preparation.
2. Roman Catholic Church. the vespers of the office for the dead: so called from the initial word of the first antiphon, taken from Psalm 114:9 of the Vulgate.

Origin of placebo

1175-1225 for def 2; 1775-85 for def 1; Middle English Latin placēbō I shall be pleasing, acceptable

Examples for placebo

It is a milder form of this same method to give what the learned faculty term a placebo.

After the surgery he discovered that he had simply drunk fruit juice with added sugar and he had been given a placebo.

This is a last phase of the metaphysical polity, and is only a kind of placebo.

The dirage was concluded, and vespers for the dead were now commencing with the "placebo Domino."

We'll call this the placebo criticism and will come back to it, too, in a moment.

Those who had received the actual drug reported better levels of self-satisfaction than the unfortunates who just got the placebo.

Of 8,696 men taking a placebo (the comparison group), 529 (9.3 cancers per 1,000 person-years) developed the disease.

The second is the placebo effect, which will often cause anything presented as medication to “work.”

The placebo effect has become increasingly interesting to psychological as well as medical researchers.

Nobody conceived of a thing like the placebo effect or researcher bias —none of these notions had been worked out yet.