dispensary
Americannoun
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a place where something is dispensed, especially medicines.
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a charitable or public facility where medicines are furnished and free or inexpensive medical advice is available.
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of dispensary
1690–1700; < Medieval Latin dispēnsāria storeroom, equivalent to Latin dispēns ( āre ) to dispense + -āria -ary
Explanation
A dispensary is the room or area in a hospital where medicine is prepared and given out to patients. You can use the term dispensary when you talk about the office within a hospital — or occasionally other places, like schools — from which prescriptions can be distributed. A dispensary is often run by a pharmacist, doctor, or nurse, who is authorized to dispense — or hand out — medicine. The root is the Latin word dispensarius, "one who dispenses," from dispensare, "disburse, administer, or distribute by weight."
Vocabulary lists containing dispensary
Latin Love, Vol III: pendere
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Invisible Son
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Hunting by Stars
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Convenience stores, gasoline stations and neighborhood retailers are easier to monitor, easier to tax, and vastly cheaper to regulate than fragmented, high-compliance dispensary systems.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 9, 2026
From the outside, it looks like your standard-issue corporate dispensary, largely because of where it is.
From Salon ● Apr. 20, 2025
She added that her shop was "propping up" the dispensary.
From BBC ● Jun. 2, 2024
“This project will change the trajectory of their lives forever,” Forrest Parker, general manager for Qualla Enterprises, the tribal company that manages the dispensary, said during the opening ceremony.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 21, 2024
When the physical-education officer at Lowery Field ordered everyone to fall out for calisthenics one afternoon, Yossarian, the private, reported instead at the dispensary with what he said was a pain in his right side.
From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
The agency can only use “back of the envelope” calculations to estimate whether dispensaries are financially above water.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 14, 2025
It had been measuring the required 500-foot distance between schools and dispensaries from door to door, not from property line to property line.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 14, 2025
Last year Assembly Bill 374 — which would make it legal for dispensaries to become cafes and offer food as well as host live events — passed the Assembly 66-9 and the Senate 33-3.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 24, 2024
Businesses that fit certain criteria could apply, and in November 2022 the OCM approved a small number of licenses for conditional adult-use retail dispensaries.
From Slate ● Mar. 14, 2024
But one of the many people who regularly brought unpleasant news of the deluge had told her that the company was dismantling its dispensaries to move them to where it was not raining.
From "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
