Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Antibiotic
/ˌæntibaɪˈɒtɪk/noun
A drug that kills bacteria or stops them multiplying.
The Greek roots
ἀντί
antí
against, opposite
βιωτικός
biōtikós
of life, living
Literally: “against life”
The story of the word
French bacteriologists had used antibiose since the 1880s for one microbe suppressing another; Selman Waksman fixed the modern noun in the 1940s for a substance made by one organism that destroys another. The name is unusually blunt about what the drug does. It also explains why antibiotics do nothing against a virus, which is not alive in the way the word assumes. Greek βίος is life as a way of living, against ζωή, life as bare animate existence.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1940s
Same family
biologysymbiosisbiopsyantipathy
In a sentence
She finished the antibiotics even though she felt fine by Wednesday.
Farm antibiotic use is now capped by law here.