Other forms: inoculated, inoculating, inoculates
To inoculate is to protect against a disease by a small dose of it. Inoculate the children, inoculated against measles, inoculate a culture.
The word came from gardening, where to inoculate was to graft a bud into another plant, and the medical sense borrowed the image of setting something small inside a living thing. In a laboratory it means to introduce microbes to a growth medium.
1verbinoculateTo protect against a disease by a small dose of it.
“The nurse inoculated the children against measles.”
inoculate is a protecting.
Latin inoculare meant to graft in a bud, from in- plus oculus, an eye or bud.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃ekʷ-
Latin
inoculātus
Middle English
inoculaten — to graft
English, today
inoculate
Built from
c; Middle English inoculaten (“to graft”), from Latin inoculātus, perfect passive participle of inoculō (“to ingraft an eye or bud of one plant into (another), implant”) (see -ate), from in- (“in”) + oculus (“an eye”) + -ō.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA