''virulent'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''virulent'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250726113931-00-⌔

virulent - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

virulent (comparative more virulent, superlative most virulent)

• Of animals, plants, or substances: extremely venomous or poisonous.
  • ✤ Antonyms: harmless, nonvirulent
• (figurative) Extremely hostile or malicious; intensely acrimonious.
  • ✤ The politicians were virulent in their hatred of the president.
  • c. 1515–1516, published 1568, John Skelton, Againſt venemous tongues enpoyſoned with ſclaunder and falſe detractions &c.:
    • ✤ More venemous and much more virulent/Then any poyſoned tode, or any ſerpent.
  • ✤ It was a casual sneer, obviously one of a long line. There was hatred behind it, but of a quiet, chronic type, nothing new or unduly virulent, and he was taken aback by the flicker of amazed incredulity that passed over the younger man’s ravaged face.¹
  • ✤ They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race.²
• (medicine) Of a disease or disease- causing agent: malignant, able to cause damage to the host.
  • ✤ Antonyms: benign, nonvirulent
• (microbiology) Of a pathogen: replicating within its host cell, then immediately causing it to undergo lysis. [from 1953]

Etymology

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From Middle English virulent (“leaking or seeping pus, purulent; (of putrefaction) extremely severe (sense uncertain)”) [and other forms],³ borrowed from Latin vīrulentus (“poisonous”), from vīrus (“poison; venom; slime, slimy liquid; stinking smell; nasty taste”)⁴ (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ﹡wisós (“poison; slime; fluidity”)) + -ulentus (suffix meaning ‘abounding in, full of’, forming adjectives).

Sense 4 (“of a pathogen: replicating within its host cell, then immediately causing it to undergo lysis”) is derived from French virulent, which was first used in this sense by the French biologist François Jacob (1920–2013) and his co-authors in a 1953 article.⁴⁵

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈvɪɹ(j)ʊl(ə)nt/, /-ɹ(j)ə-/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (General American) IPA: /ˈvɪɹ(j)ələnt/
• Hyphenation: vi‧ru‧lent

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

1. 1963, Margery Allingham, “The Well House”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, page 105: ↩

2. 2025 December 15, Greg Sargent, Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State ‎${}^{[1]}$, The New Republic: ↩

3. “vīrulent, adj.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007. ↩

4. “virulent, adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917; “virulent, adj.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩ ↩²

5. F[rançois] Jacob; A[ndré Michel] Lwoff; A. Siminovich; É[lie] Wollman (January 1953), “Définition de Quelques Termes Relatifs a la Lysogénie [Definition of Some Terms Relating to Lysogeny]”, in Annales de l’Institut Pasteur, volume 84, number 1, Paris: Masson et Cie, […], →OCLC, page 223: “Phage virulent. – Phage incapable de donner des systèmes lysogénes.” ↩

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Secondary

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