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organism

American  

[awr-guh-niz-uhm] / ˈɔr gəˌnɪz əm /

noun

• organisms
  plural

1. a form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes.

2. a form of life considered as an entity; an animal, plant, fungus, protistan, or moneran.

3. any organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being.

   the governmental organism.

4. 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

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organism British  

/ ˈɔːɡəˌnɪzəm /

noun

1. any living biological entity, such as an animal, plant, fungus, or bacterium

2. anything resembling a living creature in structure, behaviour, etc

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organism Scientific  

/ ôr′gə-nĭz′əm /

1. An individual form of life that is capable of growing, metabolizing nutrients, and usually reproducing. Organisms can be unicellular or multicellular. They are scientifically divided into five different groups (called kingdoms) that include prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants, and animals, and that are further subdivided based on common ancestry and homology of anatomic and molecular structures.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• superorganism
  noun
• organismal
  adjective
• organismic
  adjective
• organismally
  adverb
• organismically
  adverb

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• organisms
  plural

Etymology

Origin of organism

First recorded in 1655–65; organ + -ism

Explanation

An organism is a living thing that can function on its own. That includes your pet guppy, the tree in your backyard, and — of course — you. While the word organism typically indicates an actual living thing, you can also use organism to refer to anything that acts or functions like a living thing. For example, the social scene at a high school might be described as "a social organism" because it seems to have a mind of its own — like a living thing or even a vicious animal, depending on where one falls on the popularity scale.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

organism organisms

DNA serves as the genetic blueprint for every living organism, but it is also an extraordinarily dense way to store information.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 17, 2026

The community contained an unusual dominant organism, a very small predatory bacterium.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 5, 2026

"These findings are exciting because they reveal that consumption of a specific amino acid can directly regulate gene expression in an organism by increasing production of a protein enriched in that amino acid," Tavazoie says.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 3, 2026

Mendelsohn treated the parts of the building as if they were one thing, a single living organism.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026

Language, once it comes alive, behaves like an active, motile organism.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas

As we pieced together the details of how organisms work, the problem was not so much solved as dissolved.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 4, 2026

For Mr. Damasio, “consciousness is a biological process that allows organisms equipped with a nervous system to discover their own existence and the existence of a surrounding universe.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 4, 2026

Many plants and basic organisms can sense things in their environments and change their behaviors accordingly, but this does not require them to have an awareness of their selves.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 4, 2026

"The fact that we could never get these organisms into pure culture is probably because they always depend on other organisms to survive," he says.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 3, 2026

Mendel’s gift was experimentation—the manipulation of organisms, cross-fertilization of carefully selected sub-breeds, the testing of hypotheses.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Related Words

• animal
• creature
• structure