biopsy
Americannoun
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biopsies
plural
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the removal for diagnostic study of a piece of tissue from a living body.
-
a specimen obtained from a biopsy.
verb (used with object)
noun
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examination, esp under a microscope, of tissue from a living body to determine the cause or extent of a disease
-
the sample taken for such an examination
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of biopsy
Explanation
A biopsy is a sample of tissue or liquid from the body that helps determine if you have a disease. If your doctor finds a lump in part of your body, she will probably do a biopsy to see if it is cancerous or not. Bios means "life" and opsis means "see" or "sight," so a biopsy is a way for a doctor to look into your body, so to speak, by taking a sample of it. There are different kinds of biopsies, depending on where the tissue is that your doctor needs to look at. You might have a surgical biopsy or a less invasive biopsy by needle.
Vocabulary lists containing biopsy
Words to Live By: Bio
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Common Senses: Op, Ops, Opt ("Sight")
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National Nurses Week: Common Medical Terms
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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.
See Examples For:
With additional research, she hopes extracellular vesicles might one day function as a type of liquid biopsy.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 22, 2026
The content creator said her daughter underwent numerous X-rays, ultrasounds and a biopsy before the hospital team confirmed the cancer diagnosis.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 18, 2026
Instead, a biopsy of his bowel tissue found cancer.
From BBC ● Jun. 11, 2026
After ruling out more serious autoimmune conditions, my new dermatologist did a scalp biopsy and finally diagnosed me with fibrosing alopecia in a pattern distribution, or FAPD, in which inflammation damages hair follicles via scarring.
From Slate ● May 23, 2026
According to Howard Jones, Henrietta got the same care any white patient would have; the biopsy, the radium treatment, and radiation were all standard for the day.
From "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
These tests are sometimes known as liquid biopsies, and some existing methods search for mutations in DNA released by tumors.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 11, 2026
No surprise, the panel agreed with him and concocted pretexts to kill the treatment—for instance, the staff opined that maybe biopsies had zapped the tumors.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 28, 2026
Classifying a patient as cured also allows them to avoid intrusive, and sometimes painful, screening tests, like bone marrow biopsies.
From Slate ● Mar. 29, 2026
Dr Lauren Thomas, a sexual health doctor who has been training GPs in more remote parts of the patch to fit coils and contraceptive implants said ultrasound biopsies would also be available in each county.
From BBC ● Mar. 5, 2026
In this particular study—the largest ever done on the relationship between the two cervical cancers—Jones and TeLinde found that 62 percent of women with invasive cancer who’d had earlier biopsies first had carcinoma in situ.
From "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
After the initial diagnosis, Blevins said, doctors biopsied another “dark spot” that had appeared near the mole on his foot, and removed “a larger area around the melanoma.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 27, 2024
In diagnostic testing, a pathologist examines biopsied tissues under a microscope to identify cellular abnormalities that may hint at disease.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 11, 2024
So McGrane and colleagues biopsied the tongue of a 6-year-old male cat that had been euthanized for health reasons unrelated to the study.
From Science Magazine ● Aug. 25, 2023
In the study, researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark biopsied abdominal fat from young, sedentary men, older sedentary men and physically active older men, most of them longtime and frequent cyclists.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 12, 2022
I biopsied it and checked it under the microscope.
From "Boy 2.0" by Tracey Baptiste
But the laborious strategy deployed in this study — biopsying the tumor, sequencing it and then dividing the patients into mutation-guided treatments — provided few novel therapeutic inroads.
From New York Times ● Jun. 13, 2018
The movement today is toward biopsying 5-day embryos using microarray comparative genomic hybridization, which examines all 23 chromosome pairs and provides a more detailed picture of the entire length of the chromosomes.
From Slate ● Mar. 19, 2014
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.
