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aspirin

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈæs.p(ɪ.)ɹɪn//
  • United States//ˈæs.pɹɪn//

an analgesic drug, acetylsalicylic acid

noun

  1. 1

    an analgesic drug, acetylsalicylic acid

  2. 2

    A tablet containing this substance.

    "It nearly drove me insane. I took heaven alone knows how many aspirins."

    I got so worked up writing it that I had to take an aspirin and stop trembling after I finished.

Etymology

Genericized trademark of German Aspirin, from acetylierte Spirsäure (literally “acetylated spiraeic acid”). The trade name Aspirin is a registered trademark in some countries, but has entered the English language in generic usage, as various German trademarks were nullified in the United States after World War I (see also heroin).

Forms

plural
aspirins
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).