pipette
Americannoun
verb (used with object)
-
pipettes,
present (3rd person singular)
-
pipetted,
past participle, past
-
pipetting
present participle
noun
verb
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
pipettesimple
-
pipettessimple
-
have pipettedperfect
-
has pipettedperfect
-
am pipettingprogressive
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are pipettingprogressive
-
is pipettingprogressive
-
have been pipettingperfect progressive
-
has been pipettingperfect progressive
Past
-
pipettedsimple
-
had pipettedperfect
-
was pipettingprogressive
-
were pipettingprogressive
-
had been pipettingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of pipette
From French, dating back to 1830–40; see origin at pipe 1, -ette
Explanation
One of the tools in a chemistry lab is a pipette, a glass tube used to move liquids. If you were examining a chemical under your microscope, you'd use a pipette to put a drop on your slide. Some pipettes are used for measuring small amounts of liquid, but the most common use is transporting them from one place to another. When you squeeze a small bulb attached to the pipette, the vacuum you've created sucks fluid up into the slender glass instrument. Think of an eye dropper, the most commonly-used type of pipette. The word comes from Middle French, in which it means "tube."
Vocabulary lists containing pipette
Power Suffix: -ette
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"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
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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:
The pipette she uses to remove the venom from the fangs is attached to a suction hose - crucial for collecting as much venom as possible, since each spider provides only small amounts.
From BBC ● May 16, 2025
Holding a pipette carefully in one hand, Laxamana talked through the radio to troubleshoot the problem.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 1, 2024
Whenever he saw standing water Gomes grabbed a hand pipette out of his bag and looked for larvae, which he collected in a white plastic container.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 15, 2024
Latex floating on the top of the remaining liquid is slurped up with a pipette and rinsed up to three times for purification, and then dried.
From Science Daily ● Jan. 23, 2024
He pointed to someone in a glassed-in room taking samples out of a petri dish with a pipette and putting it under a large, heavy-duty microscope hooked up to a computer monitor.
From "Boy 2.0" by Tracey Baptiste
Tiny glass pipettes were used to fill the champagne bottles - but the bubbles had to be removed to make this possible.
From BBC ● Jan. 18, 2024
The fragmented and siloed world of laboratory science became the crux of the crisis; the fate of millions rested upon hand pipettes and fax machines.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 15, 2021
When squeezed in front of the eye, lemon peel produced tears on demand, which were collected in glass pipettes and placed into tubes for study.
From Scientific American ● Apr. 27, 2021
There is a delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry.
From New York Times ● Feb. 18, 2020
They could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems.
From "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
Samples of a solution are pipetted into the wells of a gel.
From Textbooks ● Jun. 9, 2022
After the bottles rolled for three days, he pipetted out the snow and analyzed the number of microplastics in each flake.
From New York Times ● Apr. 3, 2022
The researchers took nematodes from diseased trees, pipetted them onto the buds of young, healthy trees in a greenhouse, then waited for symptoms to appear and reisolated the nematode from the affected leaves.
From Science Magazine ● Nov. 14, 2019
The suspension was brought up to 5 ml with mES cell culture media, gently pipetted up and down to mix, and then spun down at 4 °C and 800 r.p.m. for 4 min.
From Nature ● Mar. 19, 2017
Next he pipetted it into a centrifuge tube and centrifuged it at high speed, some sixteen thousand revolutions, until the serum was perfectly clear, with no trace of a reddish tint, nor even cloudy.
From The Social Gangster by Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin) Reeve
For decades, the fundamental labor unit of biological research has been the lowly grad student, who toils away pipetting liquids, taking measurements, looking through results and, if lucky, maybe running a few experiments a month.
From New York Times ● Nov. 24, 2021
The federal government and corporations such as LabCorp had failed to scale up COVID-19 testing, which often involved a tedious liquid transfer process called pipetting.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 15, 2021
He wanted to extract and read DNA from his inside cheek, but his unsteady hand kept bungling the pipetting process at Genspace.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 15, 2021
To keep the process going, Kenny would drive to his darkened laboratory at odd hours of the night, carefully pipetting samples onto sequencing chips while the world around him slept.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 24, 2020
Mary didn’t realize until months later that he’d been studying her hands, checking their dexterity and strength to see how they’d stand up to hours of delicate cutting, scraping, tweezing, and pipetting.
From "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot
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.
