Psychedelics

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Agents that modify sensory perceptions and mental functioning
2. Compounds that lead to profound alterations in awareness and emotional states
3. Substances that induce changes in perception, mood, and thought processes

Etymology: The word was coined in 1956, in a letter from the English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond to the novelist Aldous Huxley. Osmond had been studying mescaline and LSD, and he needed a term for drugs that seemed to reveal the mind rather than dull it. He built it from Greek "psukhē", meaning "mind" or "soul", and "dēlos", meaning "manifest" or "visible", so the sense is roughly "mind-manifesting." "Psychedelics" is simply the plural of the adjective-turned-noun "psychedelic", which Osmond formed by adding the English suffix "-ic", meaning "of or pertaining to." The original coinage named a quality, and the substances took the name afterwards.