Word suggestion - pharma

[mkenuk]

pharma
The COD defines the word as 'pharmaceutical companies collectively as a sector of industry' and notes that it is often used in the phrase 'big pharma'.
A secondary meaning is simply 'a pharmaceutical company'

The word is also in Wiktionary

[yelnats]

I tried it too.

[Alan W]

This might almost be a case where a word could come straight into the list as common, but I'll proceed with caution and make it a rare word for the time being.

An early example was from the Consumer Research Magazine in 1992, writing about the idea of adding phytochemicals to various foods:

Such future foods are termed variously as "designer foods," "prescriptive foods," "pharma foods," "medicinal foods," "neutraceutical foods," or "physiologically functional foods."

However the term pharma was soon being used in a more ominous sense. Looking at the collocates of the word in the News on the Web corpus, big is the word most often accompanying pharma. Without studying the examples, I imagine the majority of the references to big pharma are not complimentary.

[mkenuk]

Thanks. Alan.
I suspect I might have first seen the word in John le Carre's 'The Constant Gardener', which was published in 2001.
The novel is largely an attack on the methods and practices of these multi-national organizations.