Virulence
noun ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The state of being virulent. countable, uncountable
"Francis was enraged at the interference, and opposition made him more in earnest; but just at this time, the civil war, which had hitherto left their part of the country comparatively quiet, arose with great virulence in their immediate vicinity."
- 2 extreme hostility wordnet
- 3 A measure of how virulent a thing is. countable, uncountable
- 4 extreme harmfulness (as the capacity of a microorganism to cause disease) wordnet
Example
More examples"Goldman Sachs, the American financial powerhouse, is trying to factor into its investment decisions and counsel all possible Omicron outcomes — from a worst-case scenario of greater virulence and vaccine-evasion to the nice surprise that the vaccines remain efficacious, and Omicron turns out to be more benign than its forerunner."
Etymology
From Middle French virulence, from Late Latin virulentia.
More for "virulence"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.