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Which field chiefly studies organisms?

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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

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Etymology

Origin of organism

First recorded in 1655–65; organ + -ism

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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

Then about 1.25 billion years ago, one of these photosynthesizing bacteria partnered with another one-celled organism to create green algae, one lineage of which became the ancestor of all plants.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026

This organism, also nicknamed "sea vomit", is particularly harmful to coastal wildlife and economies.

From BBC ● Oct. 14, 2026

Although the identity of the organism that created the structures remains unknown, the fossils may represent an important stage in the evolution of one of nature's most remarkable navigational abilities.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 2, 2026

"No living organism or cell had ever been found that could live without having a functioning disulfide reductase system."

From Science Daily ● Sep. 25, 2026

These rungs, called nucleotides, spell out the hereditary instructions for making a given organism.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

Efforts to refine the lacklustre Cali Fund -- a UN mechanism for sharing profits from corporations that use genetic data from plants and other organisms -- have also proved difficult.

From Barron's ● Oct. 30, 2026

"It requires a careful interweaving of data from modern organisms, of which our understanding is necessarily far deeper, and knowledge of these living organisms' genealogy relative to fossil forms," he said.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 25, 2026

For Domnauer, the hidden diversity found in these collections is a reminder that many species and potentially important biological characteristics remain undiscovered, even among organisms that scientists have already collected.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 25, 2026

But what about other biological organisms, like plants?

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 24, 2026

It might turn out that the same tendency underlies the joining of organisms into communities, communities into ecosystems, and ecosystems into the biosphere.

From "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas

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Related Words

• animal
• creature
• structure

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