antibiotics

Word family

• antibiotic
  nounB1
• antibiotic
  adjectiveB2

Synonym discussion

Sense: noun/1

Antibiotics are medicines you swallow or inject to kill bacteria inside the body. Antibacterial is a broader term used for anything that destroys bacteria — including hand soaps, kitchen sprays, and surface wipes, not only medicines. Antimicrobial is the widest category: it covers agents that kill bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microbes, so an antibiotic is one kind of antimicrobial. Antiseptics are applied to skin or wounds to prevent infection (for example, iodine or alcohol) but are never swallowed. Penicillin is not a synonym but a specific type of antibiotic — the first one ever discovered — and many other antibiotics now exist alongside it.

Common collocations

Etymology

Formed from the prefix anti- (meaning 'against') and the Greek word biotikos ('fit for life'), which comes from bios ('life'). The term was first used in French (antibiotique) in the late 19th century, but the modern medical meaning — a substance produced by one microorganism that kills another — took hold in the 1940s with the discovery of penicillin.