Everyday LifeGreek → English
Panacea
/ˌpænəˈsiːə/noun
A remedy claimed to cure every ill, and by extension any single fix offered for a whole tangle of problems.
The Greek roots
πᾶν
pân
all, every
ἄκος
ákos
cure, remedy
Literally: “all-cure”
The story of the word
Πανάκεια was a person before she was a word: a daughter of Asclepius, and sister to Ὑγίεια, who gives us hygiene. The Hippocratic Oath swears by both of them by name, so the two ancient models of medicine, the cure and the clean life, stand side by side in the first line. English took the word in the 1500s while alchemists were still hunting the universal medicine. It now travels almost entirely in the negative: no panacea.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
panoramapandemichygienepantheon
In a sentence
More funding helps, but it is no panacea for a school with no teachers to hire.