viral

UK/ˈvaɪɹəl/US/ˈvaɪɹəl/

adjectiveB1+2 meanings Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,875 of 15,258leans written

Viral means spreading across the internet at unstoppable speed. Go viral, a viral video, viral marketing.

The metaphor is exact enough to be studied with the same mathematics: what matters is how many people each sharer passes it to. Very little goes viral by design, which is why the industry built on trying to make it happen has such a poor record. The original sense is medical, of a virus.

Definitions of viral

1adjectiveviralSpreading across the internet very fast.B1+
“Her video of the dancing dog went viral and was watched millions of times.”
2adjectivecausedCaused by a virus.B2
“Antibiotics won't help, because it's a viral infection.”

viral is a quality of fast spread.

Where it comes from

Latin
vīrus
Middle English
virus
English
virus
English, today
viral

From virus + -al. virus comes from Middle English virus, from Latin vīrus. From Middle English virus, from Latin vīrus (“poison, slime, venom”), via rhotacism from Proto-Italic weizos, from Proto-Indo-European wisós (“fluidity, slime, poison”). First use in the computer context by David Gerrold in his 1972 book When HARLIE Was One.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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