One of the mysteries of the English language finally explained.
A microorganism, especially a bacterium causing disease or fermentation.
microorganism, bacillus, bacterium, virus, germView synonyms
- ‘Complex sugars coat almost every cell in the body, as well as microbes that cause disease.’
- ‘Bacteria and microbes in the soil and in the waste itself do a spectacular job of breaking down the waste.’
- ‘Pasteur was convinced that microbes caused diseases in humans but his work on cholera had failed.’
- ‘They will tend to wipe out the entire population, which, unfortunately from the point of the microbe causing the disease, wipes the microbe out as well.’
- ‘You have to have the microbe, the bacteria get into you somehow, either through the skin, through the stomach or breathe it in through the air.’
- ‘Initially identified with herpes, the microbe is now thought to cause various malignant tumors as well as a form of lymphoma.’
- ‘E. coli is similar in size to the Legionnella pneumophila bacterium and so acted as a model microbe for their proof of principle experiments.’
- ‘The approach starts with a weakened version of a microbe called an adenovirus.’
- ‘I tried to explain about microbes, viruses, but my heart wasn't really in it.’
- ‘The microbe is unusual in that most other bacteria in the same family are harmless to humans.’
- ‘When a worm dines on one of these microbial strains, the microbe's RNA is freed to turn off the corresponding worm gene.’
- ‘Theirs was the first report showing that a host nutritional deficiency could turn a harmless microbe into a pathogen.’
- ‘A virus is a parasite, which needs a host cell to live in, and a microbe is a bacterium, which is a living cell in its own right.’
- ‘This method uses gene-altered microbes to rid the mouth of the bacteria that cause cavities.’
- ‘Then there was the popular microbe theory, wherein a living microbe or bacillus caused baldness.’
- ‘Once the bacterium is within the macrophage, the macrophage's bactericidal mechanisms destroy the microbe.’
- ‘Clearly the disease microbes brought over by the Europeans had already done a lot of their work.’
- ‘These resistant microbes may include bacteria that were present from the start.’
- ‘The T-cell system develops early in life and the only way it can develop is to be exposed to bacteria and other microbes.’
- ‘In this sense, Pasteur believed that microbes could spread diseases among humans.’
Late 19th century: from French, from Greek mikros ‘small’ + bios ‘life’.
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