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general practitioner

American  

noun

  1. a medical practitioner whose practice is not limited to any specific branch of medicine or class of diseases. G.P.

general practitioner British  

noun

  1. Informal name: family doctor.   GP.  a physician who does not specialize but has a medical practice ( general practice ) in which he deals with all illnesses

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of general practitioner

First recorded in 1880–85

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.

In “Doc Martin,” Clunes played a brilliant London surgeon who develops a blood phobia and becomes a general practitioner in the Cornwall fishing village where he spent summers as a child.

From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 4, 2026

After eight years as a general practitioner in some of Thailand's poorest and most remote regions, he obtained a master's degree and PhD in anthropology at Harvard University.

From Barron's • Dec. 28, 2025

Anyone who’s ever seen a doctor knows that face-to-face time with a general practitioner tends to be much shorter, usually only about 15 minutes.

From Slate • Aug. 1, 2025

Christian Gerhard Boving, a general practitioner, told the BBC fraudsters have used his images online for 10 years.

From BBC • Feb. 14, 2024

So he sat down and, in his free evenings and weekends, wrote an eight-hundred-page textbook on the subject, painstakingly reviewing the available evidence for the most common problems a general practitioner might encounter.

From "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell

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.