side effect

Questions about side effect

What does side effect mean?

side effect means "a secondary and usually adverse effect of a drug or therapy". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for side effect?

Close synonyms include fallout. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is side effect a common word?

side effect is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.