Germ

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /d͡ʒɜːm/

Definitions

1. A tiny organism that can cause infection or spoilage ; the initial source or beginning of something ; the section of a seed that grows into a new plant
2. A microscopic agent responsible for illness or decomposition ; the fundamental origin or root cause ; the embryo within a seed that becomes the plant
3. A minute living thing that may produce sickness or rot ; the essential starting point of an idea or process ; the part inside a seed that eventually develops into a plant

Etymology: The sense that matters most for modern readers, the disease-causing microbe, is the newest one. For most of its history "germ" meant a bud or seed. Latin "germen" gave English a word for the young shoot that sprouts from a seed, and that botanical sense is still the one in the third meaning listed here. The idea of a shoot as the start of a new plant later became a metaphor for the beginning of something larger, which explains the second meaning, "the initial source of something." The microbe sense grew out of that same notion of origin. Once people came to think of infectious disease as arising from a tiny living seed of illness, "germ" was a natural word for it, and it became the everyday term for such organisms. The word is a doublet of "germen," meaning that English took it through French rather than directly from Latin, so the two forms share a root but developed separately.

Synonyms: microbe, bacteria, pathogen, spore, virus

Antonyms: antiseptic, cleanliness, purity