noun

• 1An individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form.

  ‘fish and other organisms have been destroyed over large areas of the creek’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Green plants are the only organisms in the natural world that can make their own food.’
  • ‘Eventually, it melts to supply water and nutrients to plants and aquatic organisms.’
  • ‘Plants are aerobic organisms that rely on oxygen for development and metabolism.’
  • ‘In all of these areas he always paid careful attention to the behavior of individual organisms.’
  • ‘The technology we are talking about here is the genetically modified plants or organisms.’
  • ‘Of course there are also less interesting organisms like plants and animals in this database as well.’
  • ‘Multicellular organisms such as animals and plants could then be viewed as communities of cells.’
  • ‘It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet.’
  • ‘A plant will bend towards light and single-celled organisms will dodge obstacles.’
  • ‘But these trees and bushes and grasses around me are living organisms just like animals.’
  • ‘There are a number of solid arguments that plants too are responsive organisms, that they too react to pain.’
  • ‘Most organic materials supply a wide range of the other nutrients needed by compost organisms and plants.’
  • ‘It is observed in all organisms from bacteria to plants and animals.’
  • ‘Some single-celled organisms called protists do in fact use cilia on their cell surface to swim through water.’
  • ‘To other organisms, including higher animals and plants, many synthetic compounds are highly toxic.’
  • ‘Plants are sessile organisms that had to develop strategies to adapt rapidly to changes in environmental conditions.’
  • ‘Molybdenum is a trace element found in the soil and is required for growth of most biological organisms including plants and animals.’
  • ‘Haeckel noted that multicellular animal organisms follow a common pattern in early embryological development.’
  • ‘Flowering plants are multicellular organisms where cell division plays a significant role in growth and development.’
  • ‘Oxygen is consumed by animals and other aerobic organisms.’

  Synonyms

  living thing, being, creature, animal, plant, structure, life form, entity, body

  View synonyms

  1. 1.1The material structure of an organism.
     ‘the heart's contribution to the maintenance of the human organism’
     More example sentences

     • ‘Basically us humans are only organisms, we are the same as a plant, a dog, even a bacteria.’
     • ‘In the human organism, cholesterol is the parent compound of all steroid hormones.’
     • ‘Humans and all other organisms are related by evolution to a common ancestor.’
     • ‘A genome is all the genetic information or hereditary material possessed by an organism.’
     • ‘The primary explanatory guide would be evolution of grades of organisms and their structures.’
     • ‘Many organisms have evolved materials whose unusual physical properties may make them useful.’
     • ‘Biologists assumed that proteins alone regulate the genes of humans and other complex organisms.’
     • ‘Aging is characterized by the progressive loss of functional and structural integrity of the organism.’
     • ‘Maintenance of blood glucose homeostasis is of paramount importance to the survival of the human organism.’
     • ‘The organism is transmitted to humans by the bite of the sandfly.’
     • ‘His repeated failures forced him to reconsider some common and basic assumptions about how the human organism works.’
     • ‘One of the most potent influences on the human organism is fear.’
     • ‘Nowadays, this code might contain DNA sequencing and the genetic map of a complex organism such as the human body.’
     • ‘Biotechnology can be defined as the manipulation of biological organisms to make products that benefit human beings.’
     • ‘In 2000, the organism was cultured in human fibroblast cell line by centrifugation shell vial technique.’
     • ‘Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes; many simple organisms, like bacteria, have just one pair.’
     • ‘It is believed that the organism proliferates in decaying organic material, producing the toxins that are then taken up by animals.’
     • ‘Some scientists have endeavoured to demonstrate that exposure to colour can trigger biochemical responses in the human organism.’
     • ‘Yet they are responsible for a multicellular organism with a complex central nervous system, and the human genome looks remarkably similar to this.’
  2. 1.2A system or organization consisting of interdependent parts, compared to a living being.
     ‘the Church is a divinely constituted organism’
     More example sentences

     • ‘There are some intelligent people in it, but the organism of the government is not intelligent.’
     • ‘Broadly speaking, the Greeks viewed the Universe as a living organism rather than as a mechanism like a watch.’
     • ‘According to Richard Pascale, if you want your company to stay alive, then try running it like a living organism.’
     • ‘As soon as a system - whether an organism or an economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate.’
     • ‘A company is a living organism competing, collaborating, and cocreating in a network of other companies.’
     • ‘Indeed, this could be said of any social organism: baseball teams, political parties or corporations.’
     • ‘The statement implies a living organism feeding on not only the public who gives it money, but on the employees who feed energy into the beast.’
     • ‘A covenant places the emphasis on the church as an organism of living relationships rather than an institutional organization.’
     • ‘The new theory presented the global atmospheric system as if it were a living organism, and - even more radically - attributed purpose to it.’
     • ‘That idea of progressive politics collapsed in 1970s - and out of it came the modern pessimism that society is too complex an organism to be changed in a rational fashion.’
     Synonyms

     structure, system, organization, entity, whole, set-up

     View synonyms