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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
microbe
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ After that, hardly any scientists said life, even microbes, existed on Mars.
▪ And each microbe was made up of atoms and molecules.
▪ Infectivity describes the likelihood that a particular microbe will be transmitted under particular circumstances.
▪ Knowing where the microbe struck opened a door to understanding how it might work.
▪ Life, in fact, would have been impossible for most higher forms, with only the hardiest microbes surviving.
▪ Only within the last few years have doctors begun to realize that this microbe can cause disease.
▪ Prolonged exposure, even to small amounts of genetically-engineered microbes in the air, could cause allergies in workers.
▪ Some protein molecules are simply too large for microbes to handle.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Microbe

Microbe \Mi"crobe\, Microbion \Mi*cro"bi*on\, n. [NL. microbion, fr. Gr. ? little + ? life.] (Biol.) A microscopic organism; a microorganism; -- particularly applied to bacteria and especially to pathogenic forms; as, the microbe of fowl cholera.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
microbe

popular name for a bacterium, 1878, from French microbe, "badly coined ... by Sédillot" [Weekley] in 1878 from Greek mikros "small" (see mica) + bios "life" (see bio-). It is an incorrect use of bios; in Greek the word would mean literally "short-lived."

Wiktionary
microbe

n. (context microbiology English) Any microorganism, but specially said of those microorganisms which are harmful types of bacteria.

WordNet
microbe

n. a minute life form (especially a disease-causing bacterium); the term is not in technical use [syn: bug, germ]

Wikipedia
Microbe (disambiguation)

A microbe is an organism that is microscopic.

Microbe may also refer to:

  • Microbe (comics), a Marvel Comics superhero
  • Microbe Magazine, the news magazine of the American Society for Microbiology
  • Microbe (singer), British novelty artist
  • Saša Marković Mikrob, Serbian artist (Mikrob is Serbian transliteration of Microbe)
  • The Microbe, a 1919 American comedy film starring Viola Dana

Usage examples of "microbe".

I understood, would consist of engineered microbes, their genetic material spliced together from bacteria discovered inside rocks in the dry valleys of Antarctica, from anaerobes capable of surviving in the outflow pipes of nuclear reactors, from unicells recovered from the icy sludge at the bottom of the Barents Sea.

He talked microbes and biofilms and bacterial communities even when they reached the protruding tongue of slick, black stones leading into the first cave, even during all the business of docking and handing her over the side and mentioning that she just might want to watch out for the algae that made the cave entrance so slippery and oops, I forgot to mention that little bump just inside.

Koch set to work, alone, for Loeffler had set out to track down the microbe of diphtheria and Gaffky was busy trying to find the sub-visible author of typhoid fever.

He mixed this, in a glass tube, with a large amount of the poisonous soup in which the diphtheria microbes had grown.

Like some victorious general swept on by the momentum of his first bloody success, he began shooting diphtheria microbes, and iodine tri-chloride, and the poison of diphtheria microbes, into rabbits, into sheep, into dogs.

Ivan Wallin said 70 years ago that a eukaryotic cell is a colony of microbes that once lived separately and are now joined in cooperation.

This broadens the definition, because many of the self-buoyant microbes and plankton are collected in flocs as well.

He took off great sheets of this scum and tested it and weighed it and fussed with it, and at last he told an audience of vinegar-makers and their wives and families that the microbes which change wine to vinegar actually eat up and turn into vinegar ten thousand times their own weight of alcohol in a few days.

Just then, the Community Hall doors opened, the black glob of human mass splitting like a dividing microbe.

Moreover, at the present time, when there is so much talk about the inoculative treatment of pulmonary consumption by the cultivated virus of its special microbe, it is highly interesting to know that the helenin of Elecampane is said to be peculiarly destructive to the bacillus of tubercular disease.

Their only knowledge that there was such a thing as the microbe of rabies was the convulsive death of the rabbits they injected, and the fearful cries of their trephined dogs.

Promptly, when Metchnikoff injected them, these microbes that had been swallowed, murdered guinea-pigs who were not immune.

Then Pouchet and Joly and Musset challenged Pasteur to a public experiment before the Academy of Sciences, and they said that if one single flask would fail to grow microbes after it had been opened for an instant, they would admit they were wrong.

According to Goodnaught, a financial panic would be caused by a space-born microbe that had recently gotten loose from a recycling facility on Neuman Declo, a corporate owned research planetoid in the Meck System.

So he discovered that the nagana microbes may lurk in game, waiting to be carried to gentler beasts by the tsetse.