panacea

noun pan·a·cea \ ˌpa-nə-ˈsē-ə \

|Updated on: 25 Jul 2018

Examples: panacea in a Sentence

Editor's Note: panacea Comes From the Name of a Greek Goddess

Definition of panacea

: a remedy for all ills or difficulties : cure-all

The law will improve the lives of local farmers, but it is no panacea.

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panacean

play \ˌpa-nə-ˈsē-ən\ adjective

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Examples of panacea in a Sentence

The law will improve the lives of local farmers, but it is no panacea.
a woman who seems to believe that chicken soup is a panacea for nearly everything

Recent Examples of panacea from the Web

This panacea-like image has raised questions about whether the hype has overshot the technology’s current capabilities.

— lucinda shen, Fortune, "Steven Cohen's Venture Capital Firm Gets Into Crypto With New Partner," 12 July 2018
To help protect against prying eyes, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, and most other secure communication apps deploy end-to-end encryption, but that’s far from a panacea.

— jacob silverman, Longreads, "Private Telegram, Public Strife," 3 July 2018
But Twitter’s real-world effect has hardly been a liberal panacea.

— farhad manjoo, New York Times, "Employee Uprisings Sweep Many Tech Companies. Not Twitter.," 4 July 2018
Toby De Silva—Barcroft Media/Getty Images For people with dwarfism, even education is no panacea.

— charlie campbell / kunming, Time, "Finding Love in the Kingdom of the Little People," 1 June 2018
Just as important, single-payer is no policy panacea.

— ed kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, "Incremental Health Reform Can Still (Slowly) Work," 10 Apr. 2018
But Kettl of the University of Texas said such moves were not a panacea for ensuring efficient government.

— author: noam scheiber, Anchorage Daily News, "Trump weakens job protections for federal workers," 25 May 2018
In ancient times, sugar was regarded not as a poison but as a panacea, the cure for a host of ailments, from coughs to colic.

— bee wilson, WSJ, "‘Sugar’ Review: Sweetness and Might," 20 May 2018
Officials see the new airline as a panacea for the economy.

— The Economist, "Zimbabwe launches a second state-owned airline," 17 May 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'panacea.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

panacea Comes From the Name of a Greek Goddess

Panacea comes from a Greek word meaning "all-healing", and Panacea was the goddess of healing. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, alchemists who sought to concoct the "elixir of life" (which would give eternal life) and the "philosopher's stone" (which would turn ordinary metals into gold) also labored to find the panacea. But no such medicine was ever found, just as no solution to all of a society's difficulties has ever been found. Thus, panacea is almost always used to criticize the very idea of a total solution ("There's no panacea for the current problems plaguing Wall Street").