Virulent

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˈvɪɹ(j)ʊl(ə)nt/

Definitions

1. Extremely severe or harmful in effect, especially describing a disease or poison that spreads rapidly and causes serious damage
2. Marked by intense hostility or bitterness, or possessing a powerful capacity to cause harm through aggressive action
3. Characterized by a rapid and destructive spreading power, particularly in reference to infectious agents or malicious influences that quickly overwhelm defenses

Etymology: Virulent began as a word about pus. In Latin, "virus" meant poison, venom, or slime, and "vīrulentus" meant full of poison. Middle English borrowed the adjective to describe wounds that leaked or seeped pus, and the earliest sense was plainly physical: a festering sore, not an angry person. The word then drifted from the wound to the injury's cause and onward to bitterness. Over time it came to describe hostility that is intense and corrosive, such as a virulent attack in print or a virulent prejudice, and to describe any force with a strong capacity for harm. Its sense about poisonous fluid survives in the older medical use. A more technical sense arrived in the twentieth century. In 1953, the French biologist François Jacob and his co-authors used "virulent" in a scientific paper to describe a phage, a virus that infects bacteria, which replicates inside its host cell and then bursts it open. Medicine and microbiology now use the word in that precise way.

Synonyms: toxic, poisonous, infectious

Antonyms: non-toxic, harmless