Germ

How to spell germ

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce germ

What does germ mean?

1. nounA microorganism, especially one that can cause disease.
2. nounThe earliest source or beginning from which something develops.

Germ in a sentence

• Washing your hands removes almost every germ picked up on the train.

• That casual remark held the germ of her business plan.

• The nurse explained how a single germ can spread through an office.

• The proposal grew from the germ of an idea jotted on a napkin.

Where does germ come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin germen, which meant a sprout, bud, or seed, and by extension the source from which something grows. English took it in through the French germe in the early 1400s, at first carrying the agricultural sense of a seed or the part of a seed from which a new plant develops, a meaning still preserved in 'wheat germ'. From there the figurative use arose, so that the 'germ' of an idea is its earliest growing point. Only in the nineteenth century, as the science of microbiology took shape, did 'germ' come to mean a microorganism capable of causing disease, the so-called germ theory of illness. The same Latin root also gave us 'germinate' and 'germane', the latter once meaning closely related, like a sprout from the same stock.

How the word is built

• germ (from Latin germen: sprout, bud, seed)