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say it: VAHY-ruhs
virus is a noun meaning "(virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein". It is pronounced /ˈvaɪɹəs/ — VAHY-ruhs. It carries 3 recorded senses.
(virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein
virology
a harmful or corrupting agency
“bigotry is a virus that must not be allowed to spread”
“the virus of jealousy is latent in everyone”
a software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer
“a true virus cannot spread to another computer without human assistance”
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 virus 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.