Bacteria are tiny single-celled living things found everywhere, inside us and around us. Harmful bacteria, gut bacteria, kill the bacteria.
The singular is bacterium, and using bacteria as a singular is common in speech and disliked in writing. Most are harmless or useful — the bacteria in your gut outnumber your own cells and are essential to digestion — and only a minority cause disease. Antibiotics work on bacteria and not on viruses, which is why they are useless against a cold. Note bacterial, the adjective, against viral.
1nounbacteriaTiny single-celled living things found everywhere.
“The bacteria in the gut do about a third of the work.”
synonyms: germs, microbes
bacteria is microscopic organisms.
Also accepted in games: germs
Greek bakterion means a little rod, from bakteria, a staff — the first bacteria observed under a microscope were rod-shaped. The whole kingdom of life is named after the shape of the first few anybody looked at.
New Latin
bactērium
English, today
bacteria
Borrowed from New Latin bactērium. New Latin bacteria, plural of bactērium, from Ancient Greek βακτήριον (“little rod”); by surface analysis, bacterium + -a.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA