What does curari mean?
Curari is a historical variant spelling of curare, the notorious South American arrow poison. It is a dark, resinous paste prepared by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and Orinoco basins from plants such as species of Strychnos and Chondrodendron, and it was smeared on the tips of arrows, darts, and blowpipe projectiles. Its active principle, tubocurarine, blocks nerve signals at the junction between nerve and muscle, causing progressive paralysis while leaving consciousness intact — a property that made it both feared and fascinating to European explorers and scientists. In the twentieth century, purified curare derivatives were adopted in anaesthesia and surgery to relax patients' muscles safely under controlled doses. Today the spelling "curare" is standard, but "curari" persists in older literature and accounts of tropical exploration, evoking an era when the jungles' deadliest secret was slowly decoded into a life-saving medicine.
nounAn alternative spelling of curare: a black resinous extract from certain South American plants, used by Indigenous peoples as an arrow poison and in medicine as a muscle relaxant.
- A resinous plant extract from South America, containing tubocurarine, used by Indigenous peoples to poison arrow and dart points.
- The purified alkaloid or drug derived from this extract, used medically to produce muscle relaxation during anaesthesia and surgery.
"The hunter tipped his blowpipe darts with curari before setting out at dawn."
"Legends of the Amazon spoke of hunters whose darts carried curari potent enough to fell a tapir."
"In the early twentieth century, physicians experimented with curari to relax muscles during operations."
The same poison that once felled Amazonian game through blowpipe darts later became a surgical tool — curare-derived drugs relaxed patients' muscles on operating tables worldwide.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of curari
Curari derives from the name used for the poison by Indigenous peoples of northern South America, transmitted into European languages through Portuguese and Spanish accounts of the Guianas and Amazonia from the sixteenth century onward. The English word appears from around the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries in travellers' reports, alongside variant forms such as curare, wourali, and ourari reflecting different Indigenous sources and transcriptions. The underlying term is generally traced to Cariban or Tupian languages of the region, though the precise source language remains debated among etymologists.
Related word forms
How curari is actually used
"Curari" is now largely a historical variant spelling; modern scientific and medical writing uses "curare." The substance is traditionally associated with the Guiana region of South America and appears often in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adventure literature and toxicology texts.
Easily confused with curari
Curare is the standard modern spelling of the same substance, while curari is a chiefly historical variant form.
A curry is a spiced dish of South Asian cuisine, entirely unrelated to the poison curari despite a similar look.