organism
Americannoun
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a form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes.
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a form of life considered as an entity; an animal, plant, fungus, protistan, or moneran.
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any organized organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being.
the governmental organism.
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any complex thing or system having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole that they compose and by the relations of the parts to the whole.
- Synonyms:
- structure, entity, network, organization
noun
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any living biological entity, such as an animal, plant, fungus, or bacterium
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anything resembling a living creature in structure, behaviour, etc
Other Word Forms
- organismal adjective
- organismally adverb
- organismic adjective
- organismically adverb
- superorganism noun
Etymology
Origin of organism
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In many organisms, cells divide by building a ring made of the protein actin at the cell's midpoint.
From Science Daily
Researchers will look at whether microscopic soil organisms could help tree survival consistently across sites.
From BBC
The organism is a methane producing member of a group of microbes known as Archaea.
From Science Daily
These chemical fossils are traces of biological molecules once produced by living organisms that were later buried, altered, and locked into sediment for hundreds of millions of years.
From Science Daily
To retrieve the organism, the team drilled a 25-meter ice core from a section of the cave called the Great Hall, capturing a frozen record spanning 13,000 years.
From Science Daily
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
