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Virus   /vˈaɪrəs/   Listen
Virus

noun
1.
(virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein.
2.
A harmful or corrupting agency.  "The virus of jealousy is latent in everyone"
3.
A software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer.  Synonym: computer virus.



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"Virus" Quotes from Famous Books



... graver matters had come to light. The house had an attic floor, which was unused and the scene of no activity except spring cleaning. A previous owner, infected by the virus of modernity, had put a bath into one of the attics. Now Mrs. Maldon, as experiments disclosed, had actually had the water cut off from the bath. Eyebrows were lifted at the revelation of this caprice. The restoration of the supply of water and the installing of ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... first, with the splendid pair of bays, Lord Rashborough handed Beatrice. They drove along the familiar streets that seemed to Beatrice as though she was seeing them for the last time. She felt like a doomed woman with the deadly virus of consumption in her blood when she is being ordered abroad with the uncertain chance that she might never see England again. It almost seemed to Beatrice that she was asleep, and that the whole thing was being ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... result in smallpox and yellow fever. If, on the other hand, development be further advanced or the infection be of a milder character, like scarlet fever or syphilis, the child may be born suffering with the disease or with the virus in its blood, which will cause the disease to develop within a few days after birth. This, however, is clearly not inheritance at all, but direct infection. We no longer use the term hereditary syphilis but have substituted ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... else has he a right to expect?" said Mrs. Stantiloup to Mrs. Rolland, having made quite a journey into Broughton for the sake of discussing it at the palace. There she explained it all to Mrs. Rolland, having herself studied the passage so as fully to appreciate the virus contained in it. "He passes all the morning in the school whipping the boys himself because he has sent Mr. Peacocke away, and then amuses himself in the evening by making love to Mr. Peacocke's wife, as he calls her." Dr. Wortle, when he read and re-read the article, and when the ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope

... the Rev. F. W. Robertson, in a sermon on this passage, "are those for which no test is known; there are poisons so destructive that a single drop insinuated into the veins produces death in three seconds, and yet no chemical science can separate that virus from the contaminated blood and show the metallic particles of poison glittering palpably, and say, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would have thought that noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed the huge vagrant, and yet there is no word too bitter for the younger man to use towards the elder. The fact is that Borrow had one dangerous virus in him—a poison which distorts the whole vision—for he was a bigoted sectarian in religion, seeing no virtue outside his own interpretation of the great riddle. Downright heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the chaunting Druid, appealed to his mind through his imagination, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... you." Because I thus feel, I say to others: [1] Hate no one; for hatred is a plague-spot that spreads its virus and kills at last. If indulged, it masters us; brings suffering upon suffering to its possessor, through- out time and beyond the grave. If you have been badly [5] wronged, forgive and forget: God will recompense ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... he had been attacked by smallpox of the most malignant type. The virus having spread through all his body, laid bare his ribs, and almost ate away his skull. For several months he lay between life and death; but life at last gained the upper hand. He remained weak and sickly, however, up to his seventh year, at which time a brain fever attacked him; and again put ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... under so mild and gentle a form withal, that little danger was to be apprehended for Italian temperaments, except a degree of languor, general debility, and a disagreeable singing in the ears. It was only when it worked its way into English blood, that the virus assumed its most baneful character. SHAKSPEARE, among other illustrious victims, was afflicted by it in his youth, but seems to have recovered during his residence in the metropolis. Possibly the favor of the royal hand might have proved ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... wild hunter, the ape-man crouched motionless and silent as a graven image until the fruit should be ripe for the plucking. A poisonous insect buzzed angrily out of space. It loitered, circling, close to Tarzan's face. The ape-man saw and recognized it. The virus of its sting spelled death for lesser things than he—for him it would mean days of anguish. He did not move. His glittering eyes remained fixed upon Rabba Kega after acknowledging the presence of the winged torture by a ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... American citizen. A steward kicked him down the gangway, a doctor pounced upon his eyes like a raven, seeking for trachoma or ophthalmia; he was hustled ashore and ejected into the city in the name of Liberty—perhaps, theoretically, thus inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its own virus. This hypodermic injection of Europeanism wandered happily into the veins of the city with the broad grin of a pleased child. It was not burdened with baggage, cares or ambitions. Its body was lithely built and clothed in a sort of foreign fustian; its face was brightly vacant, with ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... is scarcely possible, nor would it be profitable, to enumerate either the places or the persons who were, so to speak, inoculated with the Haskalah virus. In Grodno, Kovno, Lodz, Minsk, Mohilev, Pinsk, Zamoscz, Slutsk, Vitebsk, Zhagory, and other places, they were toiling zealously and diligently, these anchorites in the desert of knowledge. Among them were men of all classes and callings, from the cloistered Talmudist to the worldly merchant. ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... from an affected animal, he was able to produce the symptoms of the disease, the mucous membrane of the mouth being covered with the small vesicles that characterize the malady. It has also been shown that the virus of the disease may be conveyed in butter.[99] This disease is practically unknown in this country, although widely ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell

... The virus of asceticism entered South Italy from three principal sources. From early ages the country had stood in commercial relations with the valley of the Nile; and even as its black magic is largely tinged with Egyptian practices, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... Earth, evolution has produced such widely varying types of life that an organism that can feed on one is totally incapable of feeding on another. You, for instance, couldn't catch tobacco mosaic virus, and the tobacco plant can't catch ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... way to make new millions, while his natural son Victor, who had never reappeared, was living still in the shade, since he was not in the galleys, cast forth by the world into the future, into the unknown, like a human beast foaming with the hereditary virus, who must communicate his malady with every bite he gives. Sidonie Rougon, who had for a time disappeared, weary of disreputable affairs, had lately retired to a sort of religious house, where she was living in monastic austerity, the treasurer of the Marriage Fund, for aiding in the marriage of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... Regler—only refused to join him in his boat. A white is a white: the servant (so to speak) of other and more liberal gods; and not to be blamed if he profit by his liberty. The Jews were perhaps the first to interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the Jewish virus is still strong in Christianity. All the world must respect our tapus, or we ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... be acknowledged!' This, and the consciousness of its notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show of respect is an effort of courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a contrary feeling;—this is the ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall into the wounds of pride,—the corrosive 'virus' which inoculates pride with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred, and a lust for that power which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his disc,—with pangs of shame personally undeserved, and therefore felt as wrongs, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... governments being the variable elements. "The rabbits in Australia, and the far more objectionable poisonous snakes in South America and India, have been exterminated by the capture of a few dozen of the creatures in the infested districts, their inoculation with the virus similar to the murus tiphi, tuberculosis or any other contagious-germ complaint to which the species treated was particularly susceptible, and the release of these individuals when the disease was seen to be taking hold. The rabbits and serpents released at once ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... digestion. How real is the pretended power which the deicide chemists are alleged to wield? What faith can we put in the tales of evoked larvae killing a designated person to order with corrosive oil and blood virus? None, unless one is extremely credulous, and even a ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... viral disease carried by rats of the genus Mastomys; endemic in portions of West Africa; infection occurs through direct contact with or consumption of food contaminated by rodent urine or fecal matter containing virus particles; fatality rate can reach 50% in ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... Martian bug had ever proved harmful to men. Yet this was no mutated cell or virus from Earth; it was a new disease, completely different from all others. It was one where all Earth's centuries of experience with bacteria would be valueless—the first Martian disease. Unless this was simply some accidental contamination of his culture, not ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey

... it swerves the darts of hate and malice aimed at a defenseless race, so that though they wound, they do not destroy. With antidotal efficacy, it nullifies the virus of proscription so that it does not stagnate the blood nor paralyze the limb of an up-treading ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... in Italy, before the flaming wax-light altars, drink in with their mother's milk the virus of Popery, but I never witnessed a stronger case of infantile prejudice than to-day. A child of less than three years old came running out of a by-street (apparently no person being near it), and called after me, Kafer, kafer, "Infidel, infidel"! ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... old theology stated the matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... barely once, for five minutes. It never could last. She was, however, quite prepared to back Gwen if it did show signs of being, or becoming, a grande passion. Meanwhile, evidently the kindest thing was to turn her mind in another direction, and the inoculation of an Earl's daughter with the virus of an enthusiasm which has been since called slumming presented itself to her in the light of an effort-worthy end. Sister Nora was far ahead of her time; it should have fallen twenty ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... been made. Some weeks, or even months, have passed, he has nearly or quite forgotten the affair, when he becomes languid and feverish, and full of fearful apprehensions, and this appearing perhaps during several days, or more than a week. The empoisonment has then ceased to be a local affair, the virus has entered into the circulation, and its impression is made on the constitution generally. Fortunately the disposition to bite rarely develops itself until the full establishment of the disease, otherwise we might sometimes inquire whether it were not our duty ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... of the medical profession should take an exceptional interest in poisonous reptiles? Professor Reichert and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell spent a large portion of their leisure hours for several years in experimenting with the virus of rattlesnakes, and of the Gila monster, without, however, quite exhausting the subject. Doctor Holmes kept a rattlesnake in a cage for a pet, and was accustomed to stir it up with an ox-goad. A New York doctor lost his life by fooling ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... the arms of sleep. The physician took notice of his breathing hard, and his mouth being open; and from these diagnostics declared, that the liquidum nervosum was intimately affected, and the saliva impregnated with the spiculated particles of the virus, howsoever contracted. This sentence was still farther confirmed by the state of his pulse, which, being full and slow, indicated an oppressed circulation, from a loss of elasticity in the propelling arteries. He proposed that he should immediately ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... of which he sickened, as you all must when the last of the fever of aggression has been diluted out of your veins. You die of your triumph, as the bee dies of his own weapon of offence; and you can find no antidote to the poison in the nature you have inoculated with your own virus. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... It may be communicated by kissing, by accidental contact with a sore on a patient's body, by the use of pipes, cups, spoons, or other eating or drinking utensils, or contact with any object upon which the virus of the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... command a power with which he can control such cases with almost infallible certainty, provided he can get access to them within reasonable time. The same may be said of fevers, particularly those occasioned by miasmatic or infectious virus. These are often difficult to manage by the use of medicine, and not seldom prove fatal, in spite of the best talent and skill which the profession can afford. But the electric current, rightly selected and ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark

... of a peacock they would afterwards suffer from some disease, and if a woman sees a peacock she must veil her face and look away. Thus the primitive mind seems to conceive of holiness as a sort of dangerous virus, which a prudent man will shun as far as possible, and of which, if he should chance to be infected by it, he will carefully disinfect himself by some form of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... could not have failed to bring down a poet, a novelist, or a painter. Aubrey Barstowe, author of The Soul's Eclipse and other poems, was a constant member of the crowd. A youth of insinuating manners, he had appealed to Mrs Keith from the start; and unfortunately the virus had extended to Elsa. Many a pleasant, sunshiny Thursday afternoon had been poisoned for Martin by the sight of Aubrey and Elsa together on a distant settee, matching temperaments. The rest is too painful. It was a rout. The poet did not shoot, so that when Martin returned of an ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... out of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... The statues seemed about to move, the walls to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy; nay! the very sky and the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry out." Witches are there who can draw down the moon, or at least the lunar virus—that white fluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, "on high, heathy places: which is a poison. A touch of it will drive ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... pot must be broken. Rules like this have nothing in common with the spirit of Hebrew religion; they can only be remains of a primitive superstition, like that of the savage who shuns the blood of uncleanness, and such like things, as a supernatural and deadly virus. The antiquity of the Hebrew taboos, for such they are, is shown by the way in which many of them reappear in Arabia; cf. for example Deut. 21:12, 13, with the Arabian ceremonies for removing the impurity of widowhood. In the Arabian form the ritual is of purely savage type; ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... in which the quality of the vaccine virus was deteriorated, its effect is only to slightly-modify small-pox, and then the disease resembles that caused by inoculation. The operation of infecting the blood with the kine virus is called vaccination. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... patient's discarded clothes. If these lice have bitten the typhus patient and thereby been infected, it seems to be necessary for a certain length of time to elapse for the organism to develop in the body of the lice before they are able to introduce the virus into uninfected individuals ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... inspection activities under the laws specified in subsection (b). (b) Covered Animal and Plant Protection Laws.—The laws referred to in subsection (a) are the following: (1) The Act commonly known as the Virus-Serum-Toxin Act (the eighth paragraph under the heading "Bureau of Animal Industry'' in the Act of March 4, 1913; 21 U.S.C. 151 et seq.). (2) Section 1 of the Act of August 31, 1922 (commonly known ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives

... process to the comma bacilli. Hence he would distinguish between substances which merely arrest putrefaction and those which are bactericidal; for the former may simply serve the purpose of preserving the infective virus. Among other substances which prevent the growth of the comma bacilli may be mentioned alum, in solutions of the strength of 1 in 100; camphor, 1 in 300; carbolic acid, 1 in 400; oil of peppermint, 1 in 2,000; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... astuteness, having learnt to rule men by the potent spell of "cleverness uncurbed by conscience." The cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until we reach Pietro's final ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... the wine-splashed, rose-breathing letter? Why read over and over the fragments of Helen's journal? Better remember my little school- mate as she was before the poison stung her. Might she, with time and contact with life, have reacted against the virus, or must such loveliness be fatal to what is best in woman? Who can answer? Helen is dead, Darmstetter is dead, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... high ideals and glorious visions, full of hope and big with promise, but many of them will very quickly catch the money contagion; the fatal germ will spread through their whole natures, inoculating their ambition with its vicious virus, and, after a few years, their fair college vision will fade, their yearnings for something higher will gradually die and be replaced by material, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... inoculate himself, as that was thought to be the safest way of taking the disease. He borrowed some virus from a sufferer, and scarified the skin of his hand with a pin. He then bound up his hand. Next morning he found that it had festered. He took the disease lightly, and soon recovered, while a very large proportion of those who contracted ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... no doubt you were crazy, you starry young tramp, you!... but that I wished some of the professors shared a little of your virus ... it might make them more ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... days your attitude Was witty and satirical and shrewd, But, whether you were serious or skittish, Always a candid critic of things British, Though, when you were unable to admire us, Life's "little ironies" were free from virus. But since the War began your English readers Have welcomed MARTIN's admirable leaders— Which prove that all that's honest, clean and wise In the United States is pro-Allies— And learned to recognise in Life a friend On whom to reckon to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various

... And impossible persons, with no previous or subsequent existence, will endeavour to see their way to the establishment of a claim on you. And you will be rather grateful than otherwise that a policeman without active interests should accrue, and communicate to them the virus of dispersal, however long its incubation may be. You will then probably do as Dr. Vereker did, and resent the driver's disappearance. The boys, mysteriously in his, each other's, and the policeman's confidence (all to your exclusion), will be able to quicken his ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... export, it is the goods we send which are thought dangerous, and the goods we buy are forgotten. The whole conception of trade, which has been forced upon us by manufacturers who dreaded foreign competition, by trusts which desired to secure monopolies, and by economists poisoned by the virus of nationalism, is totally and absolutely false. Trade results simply from division of labor. A man cannot himself make all the goods of which he has need, and therefore he must exchange his produce ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell

... goodness. I am not of those who believe in the natural perfection of man, and teach that society corrupts him. On the contrary, of all forms of evil, the one which most dismays me is heredity. But I sometimes ask myself how it is that this effete and deadly virus of low instincts, of vices inoculated in the blood, the whole assemblage of disabilities imposed upon us by the past—how all this has not got the better of us. It must be because of something else. This other thing ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner



Words linked to "Virus" :   infective agent, delegacy, inoculum, infectious agent, virology, agency, rheumatism, phage, representation, atrophic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, malevolent program, viral, vector, microorganism, Coxsackie virus, virion, inoculant, micro-organism, bacteriophage



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