dispensary
Americannoun
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dispensaries
plural
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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
“There’s an understanding if we don’t clean this up, people are not going to buy in the regulated market,” said Tiffany Devitt, lobbyist for the March and Ash dispensary chain.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 18, 2024
She added that her shop was "propping up" the dispensary.
From BBC ● Jun. 2, 2024
The drugstore was coming in to help the doctors, but Dr. Wilde was one of the few to maintain his own dispensary and to compound his own prescriptions.
From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
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
The bill had the support of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has unionized workers at dozens of dispensaries and grow facilities in California.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 30, 2024
For one, all legal dispensaries must use licensed processors and growers.
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
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
