Topic summary
Bacterium
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Bacteria.
Etymology
The word bacteria ( ; sing.: bacterium) is the plural of the Neo-Latinbacterium, which is the romanisation of the Ancient Greekβακτήριον (baktḗrion), the diminutive of βακτηρία (baktēría), meaning 'staff' or 'cane', because the first ones to be discovered were rod-shaped. The word was first used to refer to bacteria in 1828.