poison
noun · verb
Simple meaning
Any substance that causes injury or illness or death of a living organism.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
poyzuhnSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈpɔɪzən
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Any substance that causes injury or illness or death of a living organism
A substance that is harmful or lethal to a living organism when ingested.
figuratively
Anything harmful to a person or thing.
informalidiomatic
An alcoholic drink. (Mainly in the phrases "name your poison" and "what's your poison?")
verb
transitive
To cause to become much worse.
transitive
To cause (someone) to hate or to have unfair negative opinions.
Spoil as if by poison
transitive
To use poison to kill or paralyse (somebody).
Add poison to
“Her husband poisoned her drink in order to kill her.”
Administer poison to
“She poisoned her husband but he did not die.”
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Any substance that causes injury or illness or death of a living organism
Used this way, poison is a specialist word carrying real weight of difficulty or hurt. It carries more force than its gentler alternatives. This is a scientific use: it names something precisely within a field of study, so it appears in research and teaching more than in conversation.
- Emotional tone
- Strongly negative
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Strong
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Clinical and detached
Where it naturally appears
- Science
- Academic writing
- Technical/specialist writing
- Medicine/healthcare
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use poison
- “Her husband poisoned her drink in order to kill her.”verb
- “She poisoned her husband but he did not die.”verb
- “Poison someone's mind.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
The physiological state produced by a poison or other toxic substance.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Eurasian herb naturalized in America having white flowers and poisonous hairy foliage and bearing black berries that are sometimes poisonous but sometimes edible.
Any of various Australian evergreen shrubs of the genus Gastrolobium having whorled compound leaves poisonous to livestock and showy yellow to deep reddish-orange flowers followed by…
A common perennial death camas.
Smooth American swamp shrub with pinnate leaves and greenish flowers followed by greenish white berries.
A gas that is poisonous to breath or contact.
Large branching biennial herb native to Eurasia and Africa and adventive in North America having large fernlike leaves and white flowers.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.