Pathogen

How to spell pathogen

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pathogen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pathogen mean?

1. nounA microorganism, such as a bacterium or virus, that can cause disease.

Pathogen in a sentence

• The laboratory tested the water sample for any harmful pathogen.

• Thorough hand washing removes much of the pathogen found on the skin.

Where does pathogen come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Pathogen is a modern scientific compound assembled from two Greek building blocks. The first is pathos, which literally meant 'suffering' or 'that which one undergoes', and which in medical contexts came to mean disease itself; it is the same root that gives us 'pathology' and 'sympathy'. The second piece is the combining form -gen, from the Greek genes, meaning 'producer' or 'that which is born or brought forth', the element also seen in 'oxygen' and 'hydrogen'. Put together the word means, quite precisely, 'something that produces disease'. It entered English in the later nineteenth century, around the rise of germ theory, when scientists needed a single term for the microbes proven to cause illness. Knowing that it splits cleanly into patho- plus -gen helps fix the spelling, since the middle vowel is an unstressed schwa that gives no clue on its own.

How the word is built

• patho- (from Greek pathos: suffering, disease)
• -gen (from Greek -genes: producer, that which gives rise to)