Skip to main content

Prescription or proscription?

prescription is a noun meaning “A written order from an authorized medical practitioner for provision of a…”; proscription is a noun meaning “A prohibition”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) prescription is about 105 times as common as proscription.

prescriptionorproscription

What is the difference between prescription and proscription?

prescriptionproscription
Part of speechnounnoun
Meaning

A written order from an authorized medical practitioner for provision of a medicine or other treatment, such as (ophthalmology) the specific lenses needed for…

The medicine or treatment provided by such an order

A prohibition

Decree of condemnation toward one or more persons, especially in the Roman antiquity

ExampleThe surgeon had written thousands of prescriptions for pain killers without proper examinations before the police raided the clinicnone recorded
Formsprescriptionsproscriptions
Pronunciation/pɹəˈskɹɪp.ʃən/ /pɝˈskɹɪp.ʃən//pɹəˈskɹɪp.ʃən/ /pɹoʊˈskɹɪp.ʃən/
In writing10 times per million wordsabout once in every 10 million words

Sources: prescription and proscription in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Every current meaning of prescription and proscription

prescription

  1. 1

    noun A written order from an authorized medical practitioner for provision of a medicine or other treatment, such as (ophthalmology) the specific lenses needed for a pair of glasses

    The surgeon had written thousands of prescriptions for pain killers without proper examinations before the police raided the clinic

  2. 2

    noun The medicine or treatment provided by such an order

    I need you to pick up gramma's prescriptions on your way home

  3. 3

    noun Any plan of treatment or handling; the treatment or handling thus provided

    Early to bed and early to rise is a prescription for a long, healthy, and terrible life

  4. 4

    noun Synonym of enactment, the act of establishing a law, regulation, etc., particularly in writing; an instance of this

  5. 5

    noun The act of establishing or formalizing ideal norms for language use, as opposed to describing the actual norms of such use; an instance of this

  6. 6

    noun An established time period within which a right must be exercised and after which it is null and permanently unenforceable

  7. 7

    noun An established time period after which a person who has uninterruptedly, peacefully, and publicly used another's property acquires full ownership of it

proscription

  1. 1

    noun A prohibition

  2. 2

    noun Decree of condemnation toward one or more persons, especially in the Roman antiquity

  3. 3

    noun The act of proscribing, or its result

  4. 4

    noun A decree or law that prohibits

Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.

Which is more common, prescription or proscription?

prescription appears 10 times per million words; proscription about once in every 10 million words.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How many people search prescription vs proscription?

“prescription vs proscription” is searched about 20 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.

Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.

The words