Noun he hardly felt it when the nurse stuck the hypodermic in his arm
Recent Examples on the Web
Adjective
For the past three legislative sessions, Democratic state Sen. Jill P. Carter of Baltimore has sponsored legislation to decriminalize drug paraphernalia, including hypodermic needles. Hannah Gaskill, Baltimore Sun, 6 Sep. 2022 During the stop, police observed several hypodermic needles and three catalytic converters inside the car.cleveland, 19 Aug. 2022 The city power-washing trucks worked away, clearing up human waste and hypodermic needles that did not make the sanitary-disposal boxes affixed to public-toilet kiosks.Washington Post, 22 Feb. 2022 The moment the fangs touch the glove, the venom glands plunge like hypodermic needles, shooting poison into saline. Kyle Dickman, Outside Online, 20 June 2018 Officers found on the road two hypodermic needles that the driver had thrown from the car.cleveland, 5 July 2022 At a string of encampments under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where more than a dozen people had been living, city workers confiscated tents, mattresses, shoes, coats, hundreds of hypodermic needles, and at least one rocking chair. Eric Lach, The New Yorker, 23 June 2022 Characters also use hypodermic needles to inject a secret formula.Washington Post, 8 Apr. 2022 The officer recovered 24 items valued at $664 along with used hypodermic needles and other drug use implements. Joan Rusek, cleveland, 2 Dec. 2021 See More
Word History
Etymology
Adjective
hypo- + -dermic (in endermic "acting through the skin," epidermic)
Note: Term apparently originated by the English surgeon Charles Hunter in "On the hypodermic treatment of diseases," The Retrospect of Medicine, vol. 39 (January-June, 1859), p. 50: "Medicinal substances may be introduced into the cellular tissue beneath the skin with the greatest facility by means of a minute syringe, and so introduced certain medicines will act with an extraordinary rapidity, and the most satisfactory result. To distinguish this plan of injecting beneath the skin from the epidermic and endermic, it would be as well perhaps to use similar phraseology, and call this the hypodermic method."