℞

The story

1. Latin · derived fromrecipe“take this”
2. English today℞

An R with a cross-stroke indicating an abbreviation (of recipe, response, retrograde etc). In the case of a prescription, abbreviating Latin recipe (“take this”, second-person singular imperative of recipiō); it is sometimes typeset as, or even interpreted as, a digraph Rx. Compare also Dx (“diagnose, diagnosis”) and Hx (“history”).

Words from the same roots