Haem

//hiːm// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and UK standard spelling of heme. countable, uncountable

    "Haem is ubiquitous, abundant and necessary for energy metabolism. Most bacteria have a haem biosynthesis pathway, but nevertheless, since haem is a major source of iron (an essential metal), microbes take up exogenous haem to retrieve iron."

  2. 2
    a complex red organic pigment containing iron and other atoms to which oxygen binds wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
haematinhaematohaemato-hematinhemeheme

Example

More examples

"Haem is ubiquitous, abundant and necessary for energy metabolism. Most bacteria have a haem biosynthesis pathway, but nevertheless, since haem is a major source of iron (an essential metal), microbes take up exogenous haem to retrieve iron."

Related phrases

red blood cell

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