stramonium
Meanings
noun
- The jimsonweed or thornapple plant, Datura stramonium.
- A narcotic drug obtained from the dried leaves of this plant.
Word forms
Etymology
From New Latin stramonium, stramonia (attested since the 1540s), of unknown origin. (Compare Italian stramonio, attested since at least the 1560s.) The English word is attested since the 1660s. Some older dictionaries speculated that stramonium, as well as Russian дурма́н (durmán), might derive from a Turkic source like Tatar *turman (“medicine for horses”), but the Russian word is now thought to be an internal (native) formation, and the Tatar word, properly дәрман (därman, “remedy”), derives from Persian.
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