ptomaine poisoning
1
9.9
- noun
- /ˈtoʊmeɪn ˈpɔɪzənɪŋ/
- Archaic
:
intoxicación alimentaria
- The restaurant was closed after several customers fell ill from ptomaine poisoning linked to bad meat.
- get ptomaine poisoning
Examples
-
A bad case of ptomaine poisoning.
-
After eating the seafood salad, she worried that she might have contracted ptomaine poisoning.
-
He read about ptomaine poisoning in an old medical book that explained its causes and symptoms.
Synonyms
43
2.7
An illness from eating food with harmful germs
27
4.4
Giving a dangerous substance to a person or animal with the aim of hurting them
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is compositionally clear: if a learner knows 'ptomaine' as a toxic compound from decomposition and 'poisoning' as harm from a toxin, they can infer this refers to poisoning caused by ptomaines. The term is archaic/rare, but its meaning is directly derivable from its parts and therefore transparent to a learner who knows the constituents.
Etymology
Ptomaine poisoning comes from an old idea that a poison called ptomaine formed when food rotted. People believed eating that substance made them sick, so the phrase came to mean 'food poisoning'.