remedy

From Middle English remedie, from Old French *remedie, remede, from Latin remedium (“a remedy, cure”), from re- (“again”) + mederi (“to heal”). Doublet of remeid.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹɛmədi/

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• Hyphenation: rem‧e‧dy

remedy (plural remedies)

1. Something that corrects or counteracts.
2. (law) The legal means to recover a right or to prevent or obtain redress for a wrong.
3. A medicine, application, or treatment that relieves or cures a disease.
   • 1638, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy. […], 5th edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed [by Robert Young, Miles Flesher, and Leonard Lichfield and William Turner] for Henry Cripps, →OCLC, partition II, section 2, member 6, subsection iv, page 298:

     Beautie alone is a ſoveraigne remedy againſt feare,griefe,and all melancholy fits; a charm,as Peter de la Seine and many other writers affirme,a banquet it ſelfe;he gives inſtance in diſcontented Menelaus that was ſo often freed by Helenas faire face: and ^hTully, 3 Tusc. cites Epicurus as a chiefe patron of this Tenent.

   • 1856: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part III Chapter X, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling

     He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there; before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined up, and the hallucination disappeared.

4. The accepted tolerance or deviation in fineness or weight in the production of gold coins etc.

• (Scottish contexts): remeid

remedy (third-person singular simple present remedies, present participle remedying, simple past and past participle remedied)

1. (transitive) To provide or serve as a remedy for.
   • 1748, David Hume, Enquiries concerning the human understanding and concerning the principles of moral., London: Oxford University Press, published 1973, § 27:

     Nor is geometry, when taken into the assistance of natural philosophy, ever able to remedy this defect,

• redress
• help
• correct
• cure
• See also Thesaurus:repair

• remediable
• remedial

• “remedy”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “remedy”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “remedy”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.