cure

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   to provide a remedy for or make healthy again

   The treatment cured their acne.

2. 2
   verb

   to prepare by drying, salting, or chemical processing in order to preserve

   cure meats

3. 3
   verb

   to be or become preserved

   I left the apricots to cure in the sun.

4. 4
   verb

   to make substances hard and improve their usability

   cure resin

5. 5
   noun

   A method, device or medication that restores good health.

   When you're well enough off so's you don't have to fret about anything but your heft or your diseases you begin to get queer, I suppose. And the queerer the cure for those ailings the bigger the attraction. A place like the Right Livers' Rest was bound to draw freaks, same as molasses draws flies.

6. 6
   noun

   An act of healing or state of being healed; restoration to health after a disease, or to soundness after injury.

   Past hope! past cure!

7. 7
   noun

   A solution to a problem.

   Cold, hunger, prisons, ills without a cure.

8. 8
   noun

   Cured fish.

   Well into the twentieth century, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia's Grand Banks fleet stayed with sail power. "The Lunenburg cure," heavily salted on the schooners and then dried on flakes along the rocky sheltered coastline, was traded in the Caribbean.

Etymology

From Middle English cure, borrowed from Old French cure (“care, cure, healing, cure of souls”), from Latin cura (“care, medical attendance, cure”). Displaced native Old English hǣlu, but this survived as heal.