Word
vaccine
Phoneticsvac·cine
US/ˌvækˈsin/
UK/væksˈiːn/
Definitions
01medical treatment
n. a substance given to you, usually by a needle, to prevent a specific disease.
n. a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases. Countable when referring to types or doses; uncountable as a general concept.
“The doctor gave the child a vaccine to protect her against the flu.”
“Public health officials emphasized that widespread distribution of the vaccine was the most effective strategy for achieving herd immunity within the urban population.”
Synonyms
02computing
n. a computer program that finds and removes viruses or malware.
n. a software utility designed to detect, neutralize, or provide protection against computer viruses and other malicious code.
“You should install a digital vaccine to keep your laptop safe from hackers.”
“The security suite includes a heuristic vaccine that identifies suspicious file behaviour even if the specific malware signature is not yet in the database.”
Technical
Synonyms
03to give a vaccine
v. to give someone a vaccine to protect them from a disease.
v. to treat a person or animal with a vaccine to produce immunity. This verbal use is largely superseded by 'vaccinate' in modern standard English.
“In the old book, the doctor sought to vaccine the villagers against the pox.”
“Historical records indicate that the physician attempted to vaccine the entire regiment before they embarked for the tropical colonies.”
Archaic
Usage
Takes a direct object; usually replaced by 'vaccinate' in contemporary prose.
Teaching tip
Modern speakers almost exclusively use 'vaccinate' as the verb. This form is likely to be encountered only in 19th-century texts.
Synonyms
Etymology
The word slips into English in 1799 under the signature of Edward Jenner (1749–1823), who had noticed that milkmaids who caught the mild cowpox sore never seemed to develop the disfiguring smallpox that ravaged the rest of the neighbourhood. Jenner took the Latin adjective vaccīnus, “of or or derived from a cow” (vacca, “cow” + -īnus), stretched it into New Latin variolae vaccīnae, “cow-pustules”, and injected the pus into a small boy who obligingly failed to die of either complaint.
The Royal Society called the paper boldly speculative; the public simply borrowed the first half of the phrase, and vaccine became the shorthand for any preparation that persuades the immune system to rehearse its lines without first taking the stage.
The noun is part-formed from Latin vaccīnus, ‘of or from cows’, and part-borrowed from French vaccine, a shortening of variole vaccine, ‘cowpox’. The French had already turned the Latin adjective into both noun and adjective: vaccin for the cowpox material itself, vaccine for the disease and the inoculation against it.
The English verb follows obediently from the noun, as verbs usually do once the object is sufficiently in the room. Cognates across the Romance languages follow the same Latin cow: Italian vaccina, Portuguese vacina, Spanish vacuna — all still herd-words, though the cows themselves long ago wandered out of the conversation.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.