Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Bacterium
/bækˈtɪriəm/noun
A single-celled organism without a nucleus, some kinds harmless, some kinds lethal.
The Greek roots
βακτηρία
baktēría
staff, walking stick
Literally: “little rod”
Follow a root:βακτηρία1 word
The story of the word
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg coined the genus name Bacterium in 1828, from the diminutive βακτήριον, a little staff. He named a shape, not a threat: he was looking at rod-shaped things through a microscope decades before anyone connected them to disease. Once Pasteur and Koch had done that, the plural swallowed the singular, and most English speakers now meet "bacterium" only in an exam question.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1840s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
bacteriologybacteriophagebactericide
In a sentence
A single bacterium can divide into a billion overnight in the right broth.
The lab identified the bacterium responsible in under two days.