bromide

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A dull person with conventional thoughts.

   My adviser at college was a bromide who had not had an original thought in years.

2. 2
   noun

   A platitude.

   We hoped the speech would include reassurances, but instead it was merely one bromide after another.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Bromide first denoted a compound of bromine, whose name came through French from Greek bromos “stink.” Potassium bromide was used as a sedative, and this association produced the early-20th-century figurative sense of a dull, conventional person.

From brom- + -ide. First used in the sense “dull person” by Gelett Burgess. Figurative sense ("platitude") by extending the medicating sense through the metaphor of pacifying or placating.

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