Antidotary

adj, noun

adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An antidote. obsolete

    "[…] he saith that some Jasper stones are found having in them the livelie image of a naturall man, with a sheeld at his necke and a speare in his hand, and under his feete a serpent: which stones so marked and signed, he preferreth before all the rest, bicause they are antidotaries or remedies notablie resisting poison."

  2. 2
    A book of antidotes or pharmacological preparations. historical

    "In the Antidotaries of the Ancients, we find a great many Physical Compositions which seem to be wholly design’d for the Liver […]"

Adjective
  1. 1
    Relating to or being an antidote, antidotal. not-comparable

    "A lerned man may hereby gathere that the doctore havyng an evil conscience […] poysoned hymself […] but, as it semeth by conjecture, receavyng suche chearefull message by poste from the commissyoners, wold have recovered hym selfe by medicyne, to late taken; for nuttes, rew, and fygges, ys a good antidotary preservative agaynst poysone, being taken in tyme."

Example

More examples

"A lerned man may hereby gathere that the doctore havyng an evil conscience […] poysoned hymself […] but, as it semeth by conjecture, receavyng suche chearefull message by poste from the commissyoners, wold have recovered hym selfe by medicyne, to late taken; for nuttes, rew, and fygges, ys a good antidotary preservative agaynst poysone, being taken in tyme."

Etymology

From antidote + -ary.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.