What is the etymology of virus?
What is the etymology of virus?
The English word “virus” is based on a Latin word for “poisonous secretion,” and early on it often kept to its original meaning of “venom,” either the literal or figurative kind.
What is the word for virus?
In this page you can discover 38 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and related words for virus, like: sickness, poison, disease, infection, contagion, toxin, germ, phage, flu, communicability and illness.
Who created the word virus?
In 1892, Dmitri Ivanovsky used one of these filters to show that sap from a diseased tobacco plant remained infectious to healthy tobacco plants despite having been filtered. Martinus Beijerinck called the filtered, infectious substance a “virus” and this discovery is considered to be the beginning of virology.
What is a virus in simple words?
A virus is an infectious agent that can only replicate within a host organism. Viruses can infect a variety of living organisms, including bacteria, plants, and animals. Viruses are so small that a microscope is necessary to visualize them, and they have a very simple structure.
When did viral become a word?
OED citations indicate that the adjective “viral” first showed up in the late 1940s and the verbal phrase “go viral” in the late 1980s. The adjective was used at first in the medical sense. A 1948 citation from a medical work, for example, refers to “viral agents.”
How do you say virus in Latin?
From Middle English virus, from Latin vīrus (“poison, slime, venom”), via rhotacism from Proto-Italic *weizos, from Proto-Indo-European *wisós (“fluidity, slime, poison”).
Is viral another word for virus?
Virus Synonyms – WordHippo Thesaurus….What is another word for virus?
| microorganism | microbe |
|---|---|
| pathogen | bug |
| bacterium | bacillus |
| germ | submicroscopic organism |
| plague | bacteria |
What does viral mean in slang?
According to Urban Dictionary, something that “goes viral” is an image, video, or link that spreads rapidly through a population by being frequently shared with a number of individuals.