Biology is the study of living things — plants, animals and the human body. Study biology, a biology lesson, marine biology.
At school it is one of the three sciences alongside chemistry and physics. Its main branches are named as compounds: microbiology, molecular biology, marine biology, evolutionary biology. The word is also used for the living workings of a particular thing: the biology of the disease, human biology. And informally it means the facts of the body: biology takes over. Note biological, the adjective, and biologist, the person.
1nounbiologyThe study of living things.
“She teaches biology to fourteen-year-olds.”
2nounprocessesThe living processes of a particular organism or system.
“The biology of the disease is still poorly understood.”
biology is a field of study.
The word was built in German and Latin around 1800 from Greek bios, life, plus -logia, study. It is a modern coinage rather than an inherited word, which is why it and geology and psychology all sound alike: they were named by the same generation.
New Latin
biologia
English, today
biology
Learned borrowing from New Latin biologia. New Latin biologia (1766), itself from Ancient Greek - βίος + λογία. by surface analysis, en + bio- + -logy. In English, first attested in the modern meaning in the work of English physician Thomas Beddoes in 1799. The term is also recorded in the sense of a biographical history in the work of Dudley Loftus in 1686, but this is considered by the Oxford English Dictionary to be an isolated use. The modern Greek βιολογία is borrowed from the English term and French biologie via international scientific vocabulary. zoology.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA