antivirus

Word family

• virus
  nounB1
• antiviral
  adjectiveC1

Synonym discussion

Sense: adjective/1

All three words describe tools that protect computers, but they cover different jobs. Antivirus is the most common everyday word and focuses on finding and removing viruses — harmful programs that copy themselves and damage files. Anti-malware is a wider, slightly more technical term: it covers viruses plus spyware, ransomware, and other unwanted software, so security companies often prefer it for their newer products. A firewall is different again: it does not clean an infected machine but blocks suspicious traffic coming in or going out over the network. In daily speech, people might say 'I have antivirus on my laptop,' but a tech support page would more likely say 'install anti-malware protection and turn on the firewall.'

Common collocations

Etymology

Formed in English in the late twentieth century by joining the prefix anti- (meaning 'against', from Greek) with virus (Latin for 'poison', later borrowed in biology and then in computing). The compound first described medical drugs that fight biological viruses, and from the 1980s onward — as personal computers spread — it took on its now-common meaning of software that fights computer viruses.