| ptomaine poisoning | |
| —n | |
| a popular term for food poisoning | |
| [C19: because ptomaines were once erroneously thought to be a cause of food poisoning] | |
| a gadget; dingus; thingumbob. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
ptomaine poisoning n.
Food poisoning, erroneously believed to be the result of ptomaine ingestion. Not in technical use.