Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A bitter, yellowish-brown, strongly addictive narcotic drug prepared from the dried latex of unripe pods of the opium poppy and containing alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, and papaverine.
  • noun Something that numbs or stupefies.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The inspissated juice of Papaver somniferum, a poppy cultivated from early antiquity for the sake of this product. See poppy and Papaver.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Chem.) The inspissated juice of the Papaver somniferum, or white poppy.
  • noun [Slang] a low resort of opium smokers.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable A yellow-brown, addictive narcotic drug obtained from the dried juice of unripe pods of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, and containing alkaloids such as morphine, codeine, and papaverine.
  • noun countable Anything that numbs or stupefies.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an addictive narcotic extracted from seed capsules of the opium poppy

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Latin, from Greek opion, diminutive of opos, vegetable juice.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin opium and Ancient Greek ὄπιον (opion), from ὀπός (opos, "juice of a plant").

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Examples

Comments

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  • "There were other spices that were predominantly for medical purposes. ... Francesco Pegolotti cites among his spices two kinds of opium and a botanical known as dragon's blood (extracted from the plant genus Dracanea), a medicine and red dye." 

    Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2008), 13.

    Note the hyperlink above for Dracanea will not bring you to the word's page (but this one will). Neither will dragon's blood, unfortunately, so you can get there through typing it in the search bar or clicking onto my Spice list and finding it there. :(

    October 9, 2017