Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A colorless, white or brown tasteless compound, Hg2Cl2, used as a purgative and insecticide. Also called mercurous chloride.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Hemi-, sub-, or protochlorid of mercury, or mercurous chlorid, Hg2Cl2. It was formerly prepared by grinding in a mortar mercury sulphate with as much mercury as it already contained, and heating the mixture with salt until it sublimed. It is now prepared by subliming corrosive sublimate with the proper quantity of mercury. It also occurs native in tetragonal crystals, which are white-gray or yellowish in color and have an adamantine luster. It is sectile, and is hence called
horn-mercury or horn-quicksilver. It is usually sold in the form of a white powder, odorless, tasteless, and insoluble in water, alcohol, or ether. Calomel is extensively used in medicine, especially in inflammations of serous membranes and as a purgative. Also calledsubchlorid and protochlorid of mercury, and corneous mercury.
Wiktionary
- n. inorganic chemistry mercurous chloride Hg2Cl2
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Chem.) Mild chloride of mercury, Hg2Cl2, a heavy, white or yellowish white substance, insoluble and tasteless, much used in medicine as a mercurial and purgative; mercurous chloride. It occurs native as the mineral
horn quicksilver .
WordNet 3.0
- n. a tasteless colorless powder used medicinally as a cathartic
Etymologies
- Probably from New Latin calomelās : Greek kalos, beautiful + melās, black. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“In the nineteenth century, a mercury compound called calomel was used to treat everything from tuberculosis and parasites to toothaches and constipation.”
“A mercury-containing powder called calomel was given to babies for teething pains in the 1940s and caused pink disease a syndrome that included cognitive and psychiatric disorders that mimicked autism.”
“In a general way, treatment for this sort of headache consists in the use of a cathartic, such as calomel (three-fifths of a grain) at night, followed by a Seidlitz powder or a tablespoonful of Epsom salts in a glass of cold water in the morning.”
“Use vaseline or some other grease (such as calomel ointment) _beforehand_, to prevent direct contact with the source of infection.”
“As the secretion diminishes, dry powders, such as calomel, sulphates of iron, copper, etc., may prove of most advantage.”
“A trip to the medical doctor in September of 1895 could involve the taking of medicines such as calomel (mercury chloride) or tarter emetic to induce vomiting or create a laxative effect, or if one suffered a cough, a dose of opium could calm it quick.”
“In Barbados Mr Ody, master mate of the Arab, was poisoned by eating "a Mangereen apple", causing "severe vomiting and violent convulsions, I poured down a good quantity of sweet oil, applied the warm bath, gave him a calomel purge & the next morning he brought away a considerable quantity of blood and skins of the stomach being corroded by the virulence of the fruit".”
“Even calomel and sago couldn't help three men struck by lighting on the same ship in October 1799.”
“Alcott wrote.38 The doctors gathered around their suffering comrade giving her doses of calomel, taking her pulse, and examining her lungs.”
“The liver was thought usually to be the source of disease, and a mercury compound named calomel was believed to be a great healer of all liver ailments.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘calomel’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Joycean Vocab
You ain't read no English til you read Joyce.
rasher, cygnet, usquebaugh, ephebe, entelechy, kish, caul, vicereine, atelier, daguerreotype, communard, connubial and 99 more...
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tom, dick and harry
merry andrew, spotted dick, black jack, lazy susan, bloody mary, charley horse, doubting thomas, willy nilly, jolly roger, peg leg, catherine wheel, charlotte russe and 156 more...
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The Whiteness of the Whale
Words in Melville's "Moby Dick"
grapnels, spile, pea coffee, farrago, grego, bosky, bombazine, brevet, cenotaph, cupidity, kelson, obliquity and 164 more...
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azd's Words
adamantine, abatial, ablate, ablative, abrogate, accretive, acromegaly, acrostic, actinism, actinic, acuity, adduce and 968 more...
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discoveries
These are lexical items new to me that I've discovered in actual use (i.e. not in dictionaries, lists, or this site).
Looking back over this list, I haven't the slightest idea what mos...haymow, hawsepipe, stridor, bariatric, autotelic, apotropaic, cyanotype, tourelle, autobody, zudecca, stifado, corbeille and 1073 more...
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dark and bright words of shine and fi...
scotophil, scotoma, scotia, shed, shadow, shade, scone, whiting, edelweiss, light, lightning, lucina and 349 more...
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the omnibus
preponderance, idioglossia, acumen, heteronym, flux, anacoluthon, metonymy, impetus, constellation, exegesis, revelatory, cloistered and 877 more...
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Vanity Fair
sunshiny, equipage, wherry, affidavit, gimcracks, nabobs, palanquin, toxophilite, psha, superabundant, pomatums, finikin and 128 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1406 more...
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What's next here?
thunderhead, thundercloud, cumulus, cumulonimbus, fibrous, hazy, glaciated, cirrus, nimbus, meteorology, fahrenheit, thermoscope and 285 more...
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Words that I found in old books and ...
blundderbuss, eft, bradawl, scarlatina, sclerotium, ball turret, caddis fly, calomel, cock-and-bull story, codbank, fasces, fava and 13 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for calomel.
qroqqa n. mercurous chloride
Shelves in Mrs Albright's sitting-room, where they were handy to get at, held alum, for canker sores; cocoa butter, for the chest; paregoric, for colic and diarrhoea; laudanum, for pain; balsam apples, for poultices; bismuth, for the bowels; magneeshy (carbonate of magnesium), a light, chalky substance, wrapped in blue paper, that was an antacid and a gentle laxative; and calomel and blue mass, regarded by women of Aunt Margery's generation as infallible regulators of the liver.
—James Thurber, 1952, 'Daguerreotype of a Lady', in The Thurber Album
(I'm not going to list 'paregoric' here, as I've heard the word before, though but vaguely knew it: a medicine for relieving pain, and as it contained opium in alcohol I can readily believe it. Nor the dialect representation of 'magnesia'.) Jul 10, 2008
yarb Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush - these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth - bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation.
- Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise Apr 10, 2008