Did you know that Oxford University Press awards a Word of the Year? Toxic was the 2018 Winner! From the award website: The adjective “toxic” is defined as ‘poisonous’ and first appeared in English in the mid-seventeenth century from the medieval Latin toxicus, meaning ‘poisoned’ or ‘imbued with poison’. But the word’s deadly history doesn’t start there. The medieval Latin term was in turn borrowed from the Latin toxicum, meaning ‘poison’, which has its origins in the Greek toxikon pharmakon – lethal poison used by the ancient Greeks for smearing on the points of their arrows. Interestingly, it is not pharmakon, the word for poison, that made the leap into Latin here, but toxikon, which comes from the Greek word for ‘bow’, toxon.