organism
noun
Simple meaning
A discrete and complete living thing, such as animal, plant, fungus or microorganism.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
awrguhnihzuhmSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈɔɹɡənɪzəm
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
biology
A discrete and complete living thing, such as animal, plant, fungus or microorganism.
Something with many separate interdependent parts, seen as being like a living thing; an organic system.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A discrete and complete living thing, such as animal, plant, fungus or microorganism.
Used this way, organism is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a scientific use: it names something precisely within a field of study, so it appears in research and teaching more than in conversation.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Science
- Academic writing
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use organism
- “A single-celled organism can still be very complex.”
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A person who plays an organ.
Relating or belonging to the class of chemical compounds having a carbon basis.
Formed into a structured or coherent whole, particularly on a large scale.
As an important constituent.
Create (as an entity).
Bring order and organization to.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Plant capable of synthesizing its own food from simple organic substances.
An organism that feeds on dead organic matter especially a fungus or bacterium.
Any organism of microscopic size.
Organisms without vascular tissue: e.g. algae, lichens, fungi, mosses.
A mycoplasma resistant to antibiotics that causes a kind of pneumonia in humans.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
An operation moving an organ from one organism (the donor) to another (the recipient).
The chemistry of compounds containing carbon (originally defined as the chemistry of substances produced by living organisms but now extended to substances synthesized artificially).
The sequence of events involved in the evolutionary development of a species or taxonomic group of organisms.
A process occurring in living organisms.
The entire physical structure of an organism (an animal, plant, or human being).
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.