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say it: jurm
germ is a noun meaning "anything that provides inspiration for later work". It carries 3 recorded senses.
anything that provides inspiration for later work
a small apparently simple structure (as a fertilized egg) from which new tissue can develop into a complete organism
a minute life form (especially a disease-causing bacterium); the term is not in technical use
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for germ come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.