biology
- 1The scientific study of life and living matter in all its forms.
Biology connects everything from bacteria to blue whales under one field of study.
He switched his major to biology in his second year of college.
Note
Built from two Greek pieces: bíos, "life", and -logía, the ending that turns a subject into a field of study, joined in New Latin as biologia. That ending is why biology sits so easily beside ecology, one of its own branches. English has two other names for the field: life science, often pluralized as life sciences, and lifelore, which says the same thing in plain English words.
- 2The structure, function, and behavior of an organism or a particular kind of organism.
Scientists study the biology of deep-sea fish to learn how they survive crushing pressure.
Understanding the biology of honeybees explains how a colony finds and shares food.
Note
Here biology belongs to one creature, not to a science: the biology of the whale, of honeybees, of deep-sea fish. The phrase almost always takes of followed by an organism or kind of organism, and it covers body plan, workings and behavior together. Put a place after of instead and you have the organisms of a region: the biology of a reef means what lives there.
- 3
Less common meaning
- 4A written history of a person's life.
The historian published a biology of the explorer drawn from old ship logs.
A handwritten biology of the saint survived in the monastery archives.
Note
An archaic sense that reads oddly now, because the word looks like the name of a science. Here it means a life story. J. H. Rose, C. H. Herford and their co-authors still reach for it in 1912, writing that a town "has a biology of its own", a life history stretched from a person to a place. A modern reader hears the science first, so keep this sense for historical flavor.
Practice
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Origin
Biology was borrowed from New Latin biologia (1766), which comes from Ancient Greek βίος (bíos, "life") plus -λογία (-logía, "branch of study"). In English it first appears in its modern sense in the work of the physician Thomas Beddoes in 1799.