Officinal

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title: "Officinal" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["herbalism", "pharmacopoeias"] description: "Drugs and plants sold in a pharmacy" topic_path: "general/herbalism" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officinal" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Drugs and plants sold in a pharmacy ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Pulmonaria_officinalis_800.jpg" caption="[[Lungwort]] (''Pulmonaria officinalis'') - the plant's botanical name suggests its pharmaceutical use"] ::

Officinal drugs, plants and herbs are those which are sold in a chemist or druggist shop. Officinal medical preparations of such drugs are made in accordance with the prescriptions authorized by a pharmacopoeia. Officinal is not to be mixed with the word official. The classical Latin officina meant a workshop, manufactory, laboratory, and in medieval Latin was applied to a general storeroom. It thus became applied to a shop where goods were sold rather than a place where things were made. Whereas official descends from officium, meaning office, as in duty or position.

In botanical nomenclature, the specific epithet officinalis derives from a plant's historical use in pharmacology.

References

;Attribution

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::