superbug

1. 1.

   a strain of bacteria that is resistant to all antibiotics

   Broaderbacteria
2. 2.

   a strain of pest accidentally imported into Florida from the Middle East then spread to California where it is a very serious pest feeding on almost all vegetable crops and poinsettias

   SynonymsBemisia tabacipoinsettia strain

   Broadersweet-potato whitefly

   Part ofBemisia

Other forms of superbug

plural

superbugs·

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.

Questions about superbug

What does superbug mean?

superbug means "a strain of bacteria that is resistant to all antibiotics". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in superbug?

superbug has 3 syllables: su-per-bug. The stress falls on "su".

What is another word for superbug?

Close synonyms include Bemisia tabaci, poinsettia strain. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is superbug a common word?

superbug is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.