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Latin abbreviations giving the dosing instructions on a prescription.
Also known as: Prescription abbreviations, Dosing abbreviations, Latin sig codes
The sig is the part of a prescription that becomes the instruction on the label, and it has traditionally been written in Latin abbreviations: bd or bid twice a day, tds or tid three times, od once daily, po by mouth, ac before food. Current prescribing guidance in Britain discourages nearly all of them, and medication-safety bodies list several as error-prone: od read as right eye, qd read as qid, u read as a zero. The abbreviations survive because they are fast, and they are dangerous for the same reason.
Gives the dosing instruction that becomes the wording on the dispensed label — how much, how often, by what route and in what relation to food.
Contexts: Medicine
Is actively discouraged by current British prescribing guidance, which asks for instructions in English, because the abbreviations save the prescriber seconds and cost the dispenser and the patient certainty.
United Kingdom · Contexts: Medicine
Includes several abbreviations that medication-safety bodies list as error-prone: once daily misread as right eye, daily misread as four times daily, and the unit abbreviation misread as a zero — errors with a documented record of harm.
These abbreviations are recorded because readers meet them, not because they are recommended. Safety guidance asks for them to be replaced with plain words.
Contexts: Medicine
Short groups of two or three lower-case letters written in a line after a medicine name, sometimes with a full stop between each letter.
Both belong to the written form of a prescription.