A pill was originally defined as a small, round, solid pharmaceutical oral dosage form of medication. The words etymology reflects the historical concepts of grinding the ingredients with a mortar and pestle and rolling the resultant paste or dough into lumps to be dried. Today, in its strict sense, the word pill still refers specifically to tablets (including caplets) rather than capsules (which were invented much later), but because a simple hypernym is needed to intuitively cover all such oral dosage forms, the broad sense of the word pill is also widely used and includes both tablets and capsules — colloquially, any solid oral form of medication falls into the "pill" category (see pill § Usage notes').
An early example of a pill comes from ancient Rome. They were made of zinc carbonates, hydrozincite and smithsonite. The pills were used for sore eyes and were found aboard a Roman ship that wrecked in 140 BC. However, these tablets were meant to be pressed on the eyes, not swallowed.
;Defects/imperfections arising during tablet manufacturing
*Formulation related: sticking, picking, binding
*Processing: capping, lamination, cracking, chipping
*Machine: double impression