Biomedical

How to spell biomedical

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce biomedical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biomedical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the application of biology and the natural sciences to medicine and clinical practice.

Biomedical in a sentence

• The hospital partnered with a university for biomedical research into new vaccines.

• She works as a biomedical engineer designing artificial joints.

Where does biomedical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern compound that joins two older elements from different classical languages. The first part, bio-, comes from the Greek bios, meaning 'life', the same root that powers words like biology and biography. The second part traces to the Latin medicus, meaning 'physician' or 'one who heals', which also gives us medicine and medical. The word was assembled in the twentieth century, gaining currency from the 1920s onward as science increasingly applied biological knowledge to clinical medicine, and it became especially common after the rise of biomedical research and engineering in the mid-century. Because it is simply 'bio' bolted onto 'medical', the spelling is regular and predictable; the one thing to remember is that the 'bio' is spelled with a plain 'i' and 'o', not 'byo'.

How the word is built

• bio- (from Greek bios: life)
• medic- (from Latin medicus: physician, healing)
• -al (adjective suffix)