Viral

How to spell viral

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce viral

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does viral mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to, caused by, or characteristic of a virus.
2. adjectiveSpreading very quickly and widely, especially through social media and the internet.

Viral in a sentence

• The doctor confirmed the cough was viral rather than bacterial.

• The marketing team hoped the clip would go viral overnight.

• The clinic posted advice on managing a viral infection at home.

• Her cooking video became a viral sensation within hours.

Where does viral come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Viral is a modern adjective built directly on virus, a word English borrowed in the late fourteenth century from the Latin virus, which literally meant a slimy liquid, a poison, or a venom. In Latin the term covered everything from the venom of a snake to any noxious fluid, and for a long time in English it kept that broad sense of a poisonous substance. Only in the late nineteenth century, as microbiology developed, did virus narrow to mean a tiny infectious agent, and the adjective viral was coined around 1944 to describe anything relating to such an agent. The familiar sense of content that spreads explosively online is much newer, taking off in the late 1990s on the image of an infection passing rapidly from person to person. The single r and the schwa in the second syllable are the spelling traps: it is vir-AL, not the doubled or differently vowelled forms writers sometimes guess at.

How the word is built

• vir- (from Latin virus: poison, slimy liquid)
• -al (adjective suffix)