Bios

How to spell bios

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bios

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bios mean?

1. nounThe plural of bio: short written profiles summarising people's lives or careers.

Bios in a sentence

• The conference programme printed the speakers' bios on the back page.

• The agency asked all new staff to submit photos and short bios for the website.

Where does bios come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is the plural of 'bio', itself a twentieth-century clipping of 'biography'. The deeper root is the Greek bios, which literally meant 'life' or 'course of life', the same element that sits inside 'biology' (the study of life) and 'biography' (the writing of a life). 'Biography' reached English in the 1600s from the Greek combination of bios and graphia 'writing', and by the mid-1900s casual usage trimmed it down to 'bio' for a short personal profile, especially on book jackets, programmes, and later social media. The plural 'bios' simply adds the regular -s, and because the singular ends in a vowel sound it does not take -es. A separate technical sense, the computing 'BIOS', is an acronym (Basic Input/Output System) rather than a relative of the Greek root, which is why it is written in capitals and pronounced with a hissing final s.

How the word is built

• bio (clipping of biography, from Greek bios 'life')
• -s (plural)