: occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally high proportion of the populationA panacea (Greek akos, remedy) is a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases; a pandemic (Greek dēmos, people) is an outbreak of a disease over a whole country or the world; pandemonium (Greek daimōn, demon), is wild and noisy disorder or confusion, originally from the place of all demons in Milton's Paradise Lost; a pantheon (Greek theion, holy) is the set of all the gods of a people or religion; pansexual refers to somebody uninhibited in sexual choice with regard to gender or activity.
Pan- is widely used in terms, often hyphenated, that relate to all the peoples or countries of an area, as in pan-American, of all the countries of North and South America; pan-African, of all people of African birth or descent, all the peoples of Africa, or all African countries; Panhellenic, of all people of Greek origin or ancestry; pan-Arabism, the principle or advocacy of political alliance or union of all the Arab states.
Panto- has the same sense, and occurs in words such as pantograph (Greek -graphos, writing) which was originally a system of hinged and jointed rods for copying a plan or drawing on a different scale, now often a similar-shaped structure for conveying electric power to a vehicle from overhead wires; the British pantomime (Greek mimos, a mime) was historically an entertainment executed entirely in mime; pantothenic acid is a vitamin of the B complex, named from Greek pantothen (from every side), as it occurs so wide
