Extremophile

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Any of many organisms that live under extreme conditions of temperature, pressure, salinity, etc; many are autotrophs; some are commercially important as a source of enzymes that operate under similar conditions.

    "They had found the world's first extremophiles – organisms that could live in water that had previously been assumed to be much too hot or acid or choked with sulphur to bear life."

Example

More examples

"They had found the world's first extremophiles – organisms that could live in water that had previously been assumed to be much too hot or acid or choked with sulphur to bear life."

Etymology

From extreme + -o- + -phile.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.