Antibodies

How to spell antibodies

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce antibodies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does antibodies mean?

1. nounBlood proteins produced by the immune system that recognise and neutralise specific foreign substances such as viruses and bacteria.

Antibodies in a sentence

• The blood test measured how many antibodies the patient had developed after vaccination.

• Antibodies produced during the infection may protect against a second bout for several months.

Where does antibodies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of antibody, a word coined in English at the very end of the nineteenth century as immunology was first taking shape. It is a direct translation, a calque, of the German Antikörper, where anti means 'against' and Körper means 'body'; English simply substituted its own native word 'body' for Körper. The Greek-derived prefix anti carries its plain sense of 'against' or 'opposing', because these blood proteins act against invading substances. The 'body' part traces back to Old English bodig, meaning the physical frame or main mass of a thing, and here it borrows the older scientific habit of calling any small particle or substance a 'body'. The spelling trap is purely about the plural: a noun ending in a consonant plus -y drops the y and adds -ies, so antibody becomes antibodies, not 'antibodys'.

How the word is built

• anti- (against)
• body (from Old English bodig: trunk, mass)
• -es (plural ending)