organism

[awr-guh-niz-uhm]

noun

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 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

organism

/ 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

organism

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.

Other Word Forms

• organismic adjective
• organismal adjective
• organismically adverb
• superorganism noun
• organismally adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of organism¹

First recorded in 1655–65; organ + -ism

Example Sentences

A slime mould consists of mobile, single-celled, amoeba-like organisms that live independently but can come together to function as a single entity in order to find food and reproduce.

From BBC

The organism’s various states of evolution — as an egg sac or the Facehuggers that hatch from them — are back too.

From Los Angeles Times

It wouldn’t be an “Alien” story if the xenomorph didn’t escape, along with the other organisms the Maginot was transporting.

From Salon

There are hundreds of thousands of species of microalgae - microscopic organisms, which mostly live in water.

From BBC

But this does not contain data on the volume of sewage discharge or the presence of organisms carrying faecal-oral disease in the water.

From BBC

Related Words

• animal 
• creature 
• structure