At the pharmacy

The fourteenth entry is a sobredosagem, and an English reader who reaches for the obvious word will be right only half the time. Portuguese did take « overdose » whole, and a overdose is ordinary Portuguese — but it came in carrying only the narrow sense the English word has in a news report. It belongs to the police column and the ambulance: somebody has taken far too much of something, usually illegal, and it has gone badly. A package leaflet does not use it. There the word is the native compound a sobredosagem, built on a dosagem, the dosing, so what it names is an event on the scale of one spoonful too many, and the heading it stands under says, in effect, if you take more than you should. Beside it sits a sobredose for a single excessive dose. The choice is therefore not between a right word and a wrong one but between two registers, and carrying the loan word back into a leaflet turns a routine warning into a headline.