Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Microbe
/ˈmaɪkroʊb/noun
An organism too small to see without a microscope.
The Greek roots
μικρός
mikrós
small
βίος
bíos
life
Literally: “small life”
The story of the word
Charles Sédillot proposed microbe in 1878 for the organisms Pasteur was chasing, and Greek scholars objected at once: μικρόβιος in Greek means short-lived, not small-living, so the word should have been something like microbiote. Sédillot won because his version was shorter to say. Before it, English had made do with animalcule, the word Leeuwenhoek's translators had used since the 1670s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
microscopemicrocosmbiologyantibiotic
In a sentence
Most of the microbes in your gut are working for you.