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Laudanum is in alcohol — a dark brown liquid medicine that people took by the drop. From about the 1600s to the early 1900s it was ordinary, everyday medicine in Europe and America. Doctors gave it for pain, for coughing, for , and to help people sleep. Mothers gave it to crying babies. You could buy it in a normal shop, , with no doctor's note. Then people slowly understood what it was doing: it is , so it is addictive, and it killed people who took too much. Laws came in, and by about a hundred years ago it had almost disappeared from normal life. So today the word belongs to the past. You meet it in history books, and very often in old novels and in writing about writers — several famous 1800s poets and writers used it and could not stop. When someone says "laudanum" now, they usually mean that whole world: the Victorian , the quiet respectable addiction nobody talked about. It is not a slang word and not a word for modern drugs; a modern drug is not called laudanum. Note it is a liquid, and a strong one — that is why old books talk about counting drops.
鴉片酊
組成From New Latin, from lādanum, from Ancient Greek λᾱ́δανον (lā́danon), a gum resin from a plant — and the same word as ladanum / labdanum. Interestingly, the resin it first named had nothing to do with opium. The 1500s doctor Paracelsus used the name for a medicine of his own; it was his followers who attached the name to opium preparations. The spelling with -au- may have been pulled that way by Latin laudō, "to praise" — a good medicine being a praised one — but that is a guess about the spelling, not a real source.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
laudanumnoun/ˈlɔːdənəm/
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Any of several tinctures of opium, once widely used for various medical purposes and as a recreational drug.
- Ever since my recovery from the fever I had been in the custom of taking every night a small quantity of laudanum; for it was by means of this drug only that I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life.
- Whatever else was wanting to a wise man's happiness, —of laudanum I would have given him as much as he wished, and in a golden cup.
laudanumverb/ˈlɔːdənəm/
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To add laudanum to (a drink or the like).
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rareTo cause (a person) to be high on laudanum.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。