pill

1. A pellet of opium or other habit-forming drug. 2 A bullet. 3. A cigarette.

- american underworld dictionary - 1950

As the pill takes charge the vice of sleep peels away and I become again capable of action.

When winter came in this year it was a little melodramatic. There was a big fantastic snow with big fantastic snow flakes. But, winter is old news now. The snow is like sand and the cold is deep, hardening the earth, stopping the roots from creeping forward through soil by building tiny crystal road blocks -- ice.

The pill has swept fully over me. The last sticky chunks of the sleep beast fall off my face. I’m like a newly minted coin, a freshly dipped candle . . an egg. I am sound and whole. And my heart beats in even strokes. God bless modern medicine.

Outside the wind is too feeble to pull the last dry leaves from the branches, but in my mind they're flying--

Pills, medicines made in globules, of a convenient size for swallowing whole, the medicine being usually mixed up with some neutral substance such as breadcrumbs, hard soap, extract of liquorice, mucilage, syrup, treacle, and conserve of roses. The coverings are liquorice powder, wheat flour, fine sugar, and lycopodium. In many cases pills are now enameled or silvered, which deprives them of most of their unpleasantness. Pills are a highly suitable form for administering medicines which operate in small doses, or which are intended to act slowly or not to act at all until they reach the lower intestines.

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Entry from Everybody's Cyclopedia, 1912.

Pill (?), n. [Cf. Peel skin, or Pillion.]

The peel or skin.

[Obs.] "Some be covered over with crusts, or hard pills, as the locusts."

Holland.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Pill, v. i.

To be peeled; to peel off in flakes.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Pill, v. t. [Cf. L. pilare to deprive of hair, and E. pill, n. (above).]

1.

To deprive of hair; to make bald.

[Obs.]

2.

To peel; to make by removing the skin.

[Jacob] pilled white streaks . . . in the rods. Gen. xxx. 37.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Pill (?), v. t. & i. [imp. & p. p. Pilled (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Pilling.] [F. piller, L. pilare; cf. It. pigliare to take. Cf. Peel to plunder.]

To rob; to plunder; to pillage; to peel. See Peel, to plunder.

[Obs.]

Spenser.

Pillers and robbers were come in to the field to pill and to rob. Sir T. Malroy.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Pill (?), n. [F. pilute, L. pilula a pill, little ball, dim. of L. pila a ball. Cf. Piles.]

1.

A medicine in the form of a little ball, or small round mass, to be swallowed whole.

2.

Figuratively, something offensive or nauseous which must be accepted or endured.

<-- esp., as bitter pill -->

Udall.

Pill beetle Zool., any small beetle of the genus Byrrhus, having a rounded body, with the head concealed beneath the thorax. -- Pill bug Zool., any terrestrial isopod of the genus Armadillo, having the habit of rolling itself into a ball when disturbed. Called also pill wood louse.<-- poison pill Fig., anything accompanying a desirable object or action, which makes it deleterious to him who accepts it; esp. (Finance) a provision in the regulations or financial structure (as indebtedness) of a company which makes the company undesirable as a target for a hostile takeover -->

 

© Webster 1913.