placebo
part of speech
noun (a placebo, placebos)
meaning for a pupil
1) A placebo is a fake medicine, such as a sugar pill, that has no medicine in it. tree →
2) The placebo effect is when someone feels better just because they believe they have been treated. tree →
3) In a science test of a medicine, one group gets the real medicine and another group gets a placebo, so scientists can compare. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons it teaches fair testing: to know if a medicine really works, you compare it with a placebo, and often neither the patients nor the doctors know who got which (a «blind» test). In everyday talk it means something that makes you feel better without really doing anything. Phrases: «the placebo effect», «given a placebo», «placebo group».
examples
- Half the volunteers got the new medicine and half got a placebo. tree →
- The placebo was just a sugar pill. tree →
- Some people felt better because of the placebo effect. tree →
- The scientists compared the medicine group with the placebo group. tree →
- If the medicine works no better than a placebo, it does not really work. tree →
- The lift's «close door» button might be a placebo that does nothing. tree →
- Our class did a taste test where some drinks were a placebo. tree →
note
Countable: a placebo, placebos. Said «pluh-SEE-boh». It comes from Latin «I shall please». The placebo effect is real but small, mostly on feelings like pain or tiredness; it does not cure serious diseases.
In the corpora
- A placebo is a dummy treatment with no active medicine; people sometimes feel better just because they expect to.
- Scientists compare new medicines with placebos in trials to see if they really work.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «placebo» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.