Viruses

How to spell viruses

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce viruses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does viruses mean?

1. nounTiny infectious agents that multiply inside living cells and can cause disease.
2. nounMalicious programs that copy themselves and spread from one computer to another.

Viruses in a sentence

• The clinic studied how respiratory viruses spread between commuters.

• The security software scans every download for known viruses.

• Vaccines train the immune system to recognise common viruses.

• Outdated systems are far more vulnerable to new viruses.

Where does viruses come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of virus, which English took directly from the Latin word virus, meaning a poison, a venom, or a slimy, foul-smelling liquid. In classical Latin the term carried strong overtones of something noxious oozing from a wound or a snake's bite, and that sense of a hidden toxic agent survived as the word travelled into English in the late 1300s, when it described a poisonous secretion. Only in the late nineteenth century did scientists narrow the meaning to the tiny infectious particle we know today, smaller than bacteria and capable of multiplying only inside living cells. Latin nouns of this type had no ordinary plural in Roman usage, so when English needed one it simply added the regular English ending to make viruses; the joke plurals viri and virii are not standard. The metaphorical computer sense arrived in the 1980s, borrowing the biological idea of a self-copying agent that spreads from host to host, and it pluralises in exactly the same straightforward way.

How the word is built

• virus (from Latin virus: poison, venom)
• -es (plural suffix)