Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. See hydrocyanic acid.
Wiktionary
- n. chemistry, obsolete Hydrocyanic acid.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a solution of hydrogen cyanide in water; weak solutions are used in fumigating and in the synthesis of organic compounds
Etymologies
- So called because it was first obtained from Prussian blue. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“You may fancy my desperation to have been considerable, when I rose in the middle of the night, and took some doctor's stuff with prussic acid in it,/by guess/, in the dark!”
“It must be well dried, however, because burning green laurel would release poisonous hydrogen cyanide from the prussic acid contained in the sap.”
“Not one useless question did that man bother me with, and not one necessary question did he omit to ask; his quiet clear decisive manner inspired me with such faith in him that I would have swallowed prussic acid or strychnine at his bidding.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘prussic acid’.
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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Did Someone Say a Dinner Party?
It's a hazardous world out there...poison all around. I've tried not to include too many drugs (including medicines) and have ignored the fact that too much of anything can poison you. We're going ...
cyanide, botulinum, chlorine, mustard gas, hydrogen cyanide gas, mercury, arsenic, ricin, strychnine, aconite, acetic acid, acetone and 147 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for prussic acid.
chained_bear "... Dr. Willcox conducted an initial series of experiments to rule out certain easy-to-detect poisons, such as arsenic, anitmony, and prussic acid.... Now he turned to the more complex and time-consuming task of determining whether the remains contained any poisons of the alkaloid variety, such as strychnine, cocaine, and atropine, a derivative of deadly nightshade."
—Erik Larson, Thunderstruck (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 351
More on Stas extraction method. Jul 6, 2009