Other forms: pills, pilling
A pill is a small hard piece of medicine that you swallow whole with water. Two from the strip in the kitchen drawer when your head hurts; the pot of vitamins on the windowsill that you keep forgetting.
Strictly, a tablet is the flat pressed kind and a capsule is the one with a shell that pulls apart, but in ordinary speech pill covers all of them. 'The pill', with THE, means the contraceptive one: she has been on the pill for years. A bitter pill is bad news you have no choice but to accept, and to sugar the pill is to soften it with something pleasant. Sleeping pill, pill bottle, pillbox, pill packet. The verb belongs to another world entirely: a jumper pills when it grows those little balls of fuzz on the sleeves.
1nounpillA small solid piece of medicine meant to be swallowed.
“He takes two pills with breakfast and one at night.”
2nounoralThe oral contraceptive, in the phrase 'the pill'.
“She came off the pill last spring.”
3verbfabricOf a fabric, to form small balls of fibre on its surface.
“The cheap wool pilled after two washes.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
pill is a form of medicine.
Also accepted in games: tablet
Pill reached English from the Low Countries — Middle Dutch and Middle Low German pille — and behind those stands Latin pila, a ball, and its small version pilula. That is all a pill is by name: a little ball, rolled small enough to go down.
Middle Low German
pille
Middle English
pille
English, today
pill
From Middle English pille, from Middle Low German pille. From Middle English pille (also pillem), a borrowing from Middle Low German pille or Middle Dutch pille (whence Dutch pil), probably from Latin pila, pilula.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA