Vaccine

How to spell vaccine

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce vaccine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vaccine mean?

1. nounA preparation given to produce immunity against a particular disease.

Vaccine in a sentence

• The clinic offered a free flu vaccine to everyone over sixty-five.

• Researchers spent years developing a vaccine for the new virus.

Where does vaccine come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin vacca, meaning 'cow', through the adjective vaccinus, 'relating to a cow'. The link to cattle is not a coincidence: in the late 1790s the English physician Edward Jenner discovered that exposure to cowpox, a mild disease caught from cows, protected people against the far deadlier smallpox. Jenner called the cowpox material variolae vaccinae, and the Latin word vaccina was soon adopted in English for the protective preparation itself, with 'vaccine' established by around 1800. The meaning later broadened to cover any preparation that builds immunity, long after cows had dropped out of the picture. The doubled 'c' is the spelling trap, and it survives precisely because it sits in the original Latin vacca.

How the word is built

• vacc- (from Latin vacca: cow)
• -ine (relating to)