Word.ws English Dictionary

blue-green alga

blue-green alga noun: any member of the taxonomic class or phylum Cyanobacteria; a primitive photosynthetic organism similar to bacteria which is thought to have generated the first oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.

blue-green alga: any member of the taxonomic class or phylum Cyanobacteria; a primitive photosynthetic organism...
Image: NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory This, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

blue-green alga (plural blue-green algae)

  1. Any member of the taxonomic class or phylum Cyanobacteria; a primitive photosynthetic organism similar to bacteria which is thought to have generated the first oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.
    • Blue-green algae cells lack nuclei, and pigment is scattered.1967, George K. Reid, edited by Herbert S. Zim and George S. Fichter, Pond Life, New York: Golden Press, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 31
    • Northern Ireland’s Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the British Isles, has been hit by recorded levels of potentially toxic blue-green algae that regional agencies say have not been seen since the 1970s.2023 August 23, Tommy Greene, “Lough Neagh ‘dying in plain sight’ due to vast algal blooms”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
    Synonyms:
    BGA, cyanobacterium

Synonyms of blue-green alga

Forms of blue-green alga

pluralblue-green algae

Questions about blue-green alga

What does blue-green alga mean?
Blue-green alga means any member of the taxonomic class or phylum Cyanobacteria; a primitive photosynthetic organism similar to bacteria which is thought to have generated the first oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.
What part of speech is blue-green alga?
Blue-green alga is a noun.
What is the plural of blue-green alga?
The plural of blue-green alga is blue-green algae.

Words near blue-green alga in the dictionary

  1. blue-faced rail
  2. blue-footed booby
  3. blue-fronted jay
  4. blue-gray
  5. blue-green
  6. blue-green alga
  7. blue-green algae
  8. Blue-Green alliance
  9. Blue-Green alliances
  10. blue-green bacteria
  11. blue-green bacterium

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blue-green alga (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “blue-green alga.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blue-green_alga. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.