Antibody

How to spell antibody

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce antibody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does antibody mean?

1. nounA protein produced by the immune system that identifies and helps neutralise bacteria, viruses, or other foreign substances.

Antibody in a sentence

• The blood test checks whether your body has produced any antibody against the virus.

• After recovering from the infection, she still carried a measurable antibody in her bloodstream.

Where does antibody come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a hybrid compound, stitching together a Greek prefix and an old English noun. The prefix anti- comes from the Greek anti, meaning 'against' or 'opposite', the same element found in 'antidote' and 'antiseptic'. The second part, body, descends from the Old English bodig, the everyday word for the physical frame of a person or creature. The combined term is a fairly modern coinage from the science of immunology: it appeared in English around the 1890s as a direct translation of the German Antikörper, literally 'against-body', a name biologists gave to the protective proteins the immune system makes to attack invading germs. Because the word is a transparent join of two familiar parts, anti and body, the spelling rarely trips writers up, though the single t and the unstressed middle vowel are worth a second glance.

How the word is built

• anti- (against)
• body (the physical structure, from Old English bodig)