Thymine

//ˈθaɪmɪn// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A heterocyclic base, 5-methylpyrimidine-2,4(1H,3H)-dione; it pairs with adenine in DNA. countable, uncountable

    "Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written — adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine."

  2. 2
    a base found in DNA (but not in RNA) and derived from pyrimidine; pairs with adenine wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
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Example

More examples

"DNA is composed of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine."

Etymology

From thymus + -ine. Thymine was first isolated in 1893 by Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann from calves' thymus glands, hence its name.

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