Word of the Day, and why I post one, though not every day.

I used to do this on facebook.

I just find Merriam-Webster's one for the day in question, copy and paste, and edit out all the links and ads.

I don't share one unless it has meaning for me. It helps if it's new to me too.

Today was not a word that inspired me. It was "cohort".

But one back arrow, and I found this one. Fallen out of favor, because medicine in the West used to be a completely different phenomenon than it is now. I suspect the fact that it is practiced for profit has something to do with that.

So here we go:

Word of the Day (thanks, M-W)

officinal

adjective uh-FISS-uh-nul
Definition : tending or used to cure disease or relieve pain : medicinal

Did You Know?
Officinal is a word applied in medicine to plants and herbs that are used in medicinal preparations. For most of the 19th century, it was the standard word used by the United States Pharmacopeia to refer to the drugs, chemicals, and medicinal preparations that they recognized, but by the 1870s it was replaced by official in this context. Despite this supersession, you still can find a healthy dose of officinal in the pharmaceutical field, where it is used today as a word describing preparations that are regularly kept in stock at pharmacies. Officinal was derived from the Medieval Latin noun officina, a word for the storeroom of a monastery in which provisions and medicines were kept. In Latin, officina means "workshop."

Examples
The plant turned out to have officinal properties and could be used to make an anti-itch ointment.

"Europe's mania for rhubarb in the second half of the eighteenth century energized the drive to find the plant in its native habitat. Was this plant … the very same one that for so long had provided the officinal root for European pharmacies? — Clifford M. Foust, Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug, 1992