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Syllable division derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
rickettsia is a noun meaning "any of a group of very small rod-shaped bacteria that live in biting arthropods (as ticks and mites) and cause disease in vertebrate hosts; they cause typhus and other febrile diseases in human beings". It carries one recorded sense.
any of a group of very small rod-shaped bacteria that live in biting arthropods (as ticks and mites) and cause disease in vertebrate hosts; they cause typhus and other febrile diseases in human beings
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 rickettsia come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.