Bacterium

How to spell bacterium

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce bacterium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bacterium mean?

1. nounA single microscopic single-celled organism, the singular form of bacteria.

Bacterium in a sentence

• The lab isolated a single bacterium from the contaminated water sample.

• Each bacterium can divide rapidly under warm, moist conditions.

Where does bacterium come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the modern Latin bacterium, which was taken directly from the Greek baktErion, a diminutive meaning 'little staff' or 'little rod'. The parent word baktEria simply meant a walking stick or cane, so the name literally pictures a tiny rod, the shape of the very first such organisms seen under early microscopes. The German naturalist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg coined the scientific term in 1838 after observing these minute rod-shaped forms. Because it was built as a Latin neuter noun, the singular keeps the classical -um ending while the plural becomes bacteria, exactly the pattern seen in datum and data, or medium and media. That shifting ending is the spelling trap: bacterium for one, bacteria for many, and writers often blur the two.

How the word is built

• bacter- (from Greek bakterion: little rod, staff)
• -ium (Latin neuter singular noun suffix)