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pacifier

UK/ˈpæsɪfaɪə/US/ˈpæsɪfaɪɚ/
nounB1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,347 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: pacifiers

A pacifier is the rubber teat a baby sucks to stay calm. Give the baby a pacifier, drop the pacifier, wean off the pacifier.

It is the American word; Britain says dummy and Australia says dummy too. The name is the honest one of the three, since the whole purpose of a pacifier is to settle a baby who is not hungry.

Crisco 1492 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of pacifier

  1. 1nounpacifierThe rubber teat a baby sucks to stay calm.B1

    “The baby stopped crying as soon as his mother gave him his pacifier.”

pacifier is a teat.

Also accepted in games: dummy

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    pāx — peace

  2. Middle French

    pacifier

  3. English

    pacify

  4. English, today

    pacifier

Built from

  • faciō · Latin — to do, make

From pacify + -er. pacify comes from Middle French pacifier, from Latin pāx (“peace”) + faciō (“to do, make”). Cognate with pay and peacify.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Family & People

Practise this word

pacifier in the wild

  • A pacifier is an artificial nipple given to an infant to suck upon.

    Pacifier (disambiguation)

  • Sugar tit is a folk name for a baby pacifier, or dummy, that was once commonly made and used in North America and Britain.

    Sugar tit

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the faciō family

officefact

pacifier — used about once every 8,568 pages · #11,347 · point at the bar for the others