Other forms: viruses
A virus is the tiny thing that makes you ill and passes from one person to the next. Flu going round the office, a cold picked up on a plane, the measles a school sends letters home about.
Here is the point learners get wrong: antibiotics kill bacteria, and they do nothing at all to a virus. The plural is viruses, not viri. Virus also names the illness itself — I picked up a virus on holiday. The computer virus is a program written to spread from machine to machine and cause damage, which is why you run antivirus software. And viral pulls double duty: a viral infection is medical, while a video going viral spreads the same way a virus does, person to person, fast.
1nounvirusAn extremely small agent that gets inside living cells, copies itself there and causes disease.~70%
“The virus spread through the whole school in under a week.”
2nounillnessAn illness caused by such an agent.~2%
“I picked up a virus on holiday and lost three days to it.”
3nouncomputerA program written to spread from computer to computer and do harm.~28%
“The virus arrived as an attachment and wiped half the drive.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 7 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin virus meant poison, slime or venom, and it came from a Proto-Indo-European word for a fluid that runs and poisons. English took it whole through Middle English and gave it to medicine. The computer sense is young and has an author: David Gerrold used it in his 1972 novel When HARLIE Was One.
Latin
vīrus
Middle English
virus
English, today
virus
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