Virus

How to spell virus

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce virus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does virus mean?

1. nounA microscopic infectious agent that replicates inside the living cells of a host and causes disease.
2. nounA malicious self-replicating program that spreads between computers and damages files or systems.

Virus in a sentence

• The clinic confirmed that a virus was behind the outbreak.

• The email attachment carried a virus that locked his files.

• Washing your hands often slows the spread of any virus.

• The security software detected the virus before it spread.

Where does virus come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin virus, which literally meant a poison, venom, or a slimy, foul-smelling liquid. In its earliest English use during the 1500s it carried that older sense of a poisonous secretion or venom oozing from a wound. By the late 1800s, as scientists discovered infectious agents smaller than bacteria that could pass through fine filters, the word was repurposed for these tiny disease-causing particles, and that medical meaning became dominant in the 1900s. The computing sense, a malicious self-replicating program, was coined by analogy in the early 1980s because such code spreads from machine to machine much as an infection spreads between hosts. A helpful spelling note: although it descends from a Latin word, the everyday English plural is simply 'viruses', since Latin virus was a mass noun with no ordinary plural of its own.

How the word is built

• vir- (from Latin virus: poison, slimy liquid)
• -us (Latin noun ending)