Definition of "anodyne"

Many a time has the vapor of ether been inhaled for the relief of oppressed lungs; many a time has the sought relief been thus obtained; and just so many times has the discovery of the wonderful anodyne properties of this gas, as affecting all bodily suffering, been brushed past and overlooked.

1847 June 12, Littell's Living Age, volume 13, number 161, page 483

The citrate is the most efficient as an alkali, but irritates some stomachs, the liquor the most anodyne, the acetate the most diuretic.

1910, Edward L. Keyes, Diseases of the Genito-Urinary Organs, page 211

It all became so routine, so anodyne, so dull.

20 May 2003, The Guardian

What is less known about Cavalleria is that its story is the purest, most anodyne form of a myth about Sicily and the mafia, a myth that was something akin to the official ideology of the Sicilian mafia for nearly a century and a half.

2004, John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History Of The Sicilian Mafia, Hodder & Stoughton

States typically like to stick to anodyne messages, like saving wildflowers or animals. But every so often a controversy crops up.

2010 December 9, “Rattled”, in The Economist

when the princess’s former nanny Marion Crawford, “Crawfie”, published an entirely anodyne and sycophantic memoir in 1950, she was cast into outer darkness by the family.

September 8 2022, Stephen Bates, “Queen Elizabeth II obituary”, in The Guardian‎

Nor do I mean to say that Virtue is not Virtue because it is never tempted to go astray; only that dulness is a much finer gift than we give it credit for being; and that some people are very lucky whom Nature has endowed with a good store of that great anodyne.

1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 16, in The History of Pendennis. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850

The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.

1891, Oscar Wilde, chapter VII, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, London, New York, N.Y., Melbourne, Vic.: Ward Lock & Co.

So, with a sigh, because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

1929, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, page 79