ORGANISM • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Organism

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/ˈɔrgənˌɪzəm/ Listen

noun

Organism n.

Organic structure; organization. "The advantageous organism of the eye."

(Biol.) An organized being; a living body, either vegetable or animal, composed of different organs or parts with functions which are separate, but mutually dependent, and essential to the life of the individual. Note: Some of the lower forms of life are so simple in structure as to be without organs, but are still called organisms, since they have different parts analogous in functions to the organs of higher plants and animals.

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Etymology of 'Organism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Organism" Quotes from Famous Books

... her nature even from him. And it was not difficult. She remained childishly immature and backward in many things. She was a personality; that was clear; one could hardly say that she was or had a character. She was a bundle of loves and hates; a force, not an organism; and her father was often as much puzzled ...

— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... with the power to protect the citizen in his civil and political rights. Now, sir, what are civil rights? Rights natural, modified by civil society. Mr. Lieber says: "By civil liberty is meant, not only the absence of individual restraint, but liberty within the social system and political organism—a combination of principles, and laws which acknowledge, protect, and favor the dignity of man * * * civil liberty is the result of man's two fold character as an individual and social being, so soon as both are ...

— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... tasteless and odorless, spread in generous quantity through the atmosphere, causes, when it is breathed, serious agitation to the human organism. One who lives in an air saturated with oxygen ...

— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... distance of a mile eastward, is cleanly cut as that of a marble inlay. It is varied with protuberances, which from hereabouts have the animal aspect of warts, wens, knuckles, and hips. It may indeed be likened to an enormous many- limbed organism of an antediluvian time—partaking of the cephalopod in shape—lying lifeless, and covered with a thin green cloth, which hides its substance, while revealing its contour. This dull green mantle of herbage stretches down towards the levels, where the ploughs have essayed for centuries ...

— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... replenishment of an exhausted soil,—namely, the giving back to the frame those essentials to its nutrition, which it has lost by the action or accident of time; or supplying that special pabulum or energy in which the individual organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing or counterbalancing that in which it super-abounds,—a theory upon which some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success. But on these essays, slight and suggestive, rather than ...

— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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