Etymology

finasteride

F4I1N1A1S1T1E1R1I1D2E1

Today it means: A medication used to treat male pattern baldness and benign prostatic hyperplasia in males. Full definition →

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The story

From fina (“possibly a coined pharmaceutical name developed by scientists at Merck”) + -steride (“a testosterone reductase inhibitor”). First use appears c. 1989 in the publication Pharmaceutical Business News.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.