panacea

panacea
noun
pan·;a·;cea ;pa-n;-;s;-;
Synonyms of panacea
: a remedy for all ills or difficulties : cure-all
The law will improve the lives of local farmers, but it is no panacea.
panacean
;pa-n;-;s;-;n
 adjective


Did you know?
The maxim “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” isn’t true, but belief in a miraculous botanical “cure for whatever ails ya” has existed for millennia and is at the root of the word panacea. In current use, panacea most often refers to a remedy—medical or otherwise—that inevitably falls far short of what some claim or hope it can do, but the word’s Latin and Greek forebears referred to plants with legit healing properties, including mints and yarrows. Both the Latin word panac;a and its Greek antecedent pan;keia (from the word panak;s, meaning “all-healing”) were applied especially to flowering herbs (genus Opopanax) of the carrot family used to treat various ailments.

Synonyms
remedy
cure
elixir
cure-all
nostrum
Examples of panacea in a Sentence
The law will improve the lives of local farmers, but it is no panacea.
a woman who seems to believe that chicken soup is a panacea for nearly everything
Recent Examples on the Web
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
This isn’t a panacea for the priciest programs, including most MBAs.
—Ryan Craig, Forbes.com, 9 July 2025
But clearly there are still limits here—AI can’t be some sort of panacea.
—Lee Billings, Scientific American, 21 May 2025
Braniff and others are quick to stress the programs overseen by CP3 aren’t a panacea.
—Will Carless, USA Today, 18 June 2025
Their panacea was a rare, breakout night from their offense.
—Patrick Saunders, Denver Post, 17 May 2025

Word History
Etymology
borrowed from New Latin panac;a "universal remedy, cure-all," going back to Latin, "any of various medicinal plants," borrowed from Greek pan;keia "name of a medicinal plant, universal remedy, (as a personified abstraction) a goddess of healing," derivative of panak;s "all-healing," from pan- pan- + -ak;s, adjective derivative of ;kos (neuter s-stem) "cure, remedy, relief," of uncertain origin

Note: If initial aspiration was lost, and the aspiration was the residue of yod, then ;kos might be comparable with Old Irish ;cc "payment, compensation, redemption, act of curing, healing" (Modern Irish ;oc), Middle Welsh yach "healthy" (Modern Welsh iach), Old Cornish iach (glossing Latin s;nus), Old Breton iac (glossing Latin suspite = sospite "safe and sound") (Modern Breton yac'h "healthy"). The phonetic details are problematic, however.

First Known Use
1548, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of panacea was in 1548
See more words from the same year