Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Probiotic
/ˌproʊbaɪˈɑtɪk/noun
A live micro-organism taken in food or supplements for a claimed health benefit.
The Greek roots
πρό
pró
before, in front of
βιωτικός
biōtikós
pertaining to life
Literally: “for life”
The story of the word
The word was built as the mirror of antibiotic. Lilly and Stillwell used probiotics in Science in 1965 for substances made by one micro-organism that make another grow, and the German bacteriologist Werner Kollath had used Probiotika a decade earlier in a looser sense. The pro- is usually read as Latin for or in favour of rather than Greek before, which makes the word a hybrid. βίος is a life as it is lived, a course of living, as against ζωή, life as bare animate existence.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1965
Same family
antibioticbiologysymbiosisamphibian
In a sentence
The doctor suggested a probiotic after the second week of antibiotics.
Half the probiotic yoghurts on the shelf name a strain nobody has tested.