Idiom idiom
apothecary's Latin
Meaning
barbarous Latin; badly-spoken Latin.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“The old doctor wrote his notes in apothecary's Latin.”
“The student struggled to read the ancient medical text because it was written in poor apothecary's Latin.”
“Scholars often dismiss the messy, ungrammatical scribbles found in medieval medical journals as nothing more than apothecary's Latin.”
Anchors to
Last updated August 10, 2026