1582: addict Apr 14, 2019

It has been discussed here before how ‘addict’ backformed from ‘addicted’, and has its first recorded use in only 1909, but this is only scratching the surface of the history of this word. ‘Addicted’ comes from a Latin verb ‘addicere’ meaning ‘say to’ i.e. ‘dictate’, but would often mean something more like ‘assigned’, as in slavery. Indeed, eventually it came to refer to someone who was seen to be a slave not to a person so much but to a substance usually.

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