Word.ws English Dictionary

inoculus

US/ɪˈnɒkjələs/

inoculus is the misconstruction of inoculum.

Meaning of inoculum

Noun

inoculum (countable and uncountable, plural inoculums or inocula)

  1. The active material used in an inoculation; an inoculant (i.e., a material or a dose thereof).
    • Observers noted that Chinese variolators in Vietnam exhibited one or two slight variations in their practice, however, one constant factor is that they all introduced inoculum into the nasal passages.2015, C. Michele Thompson, Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History, page 82
    Synonyms:
    inoculate

Forms of inoculus

pluralinoculi

Origin of inoculus

By misremembering a neuter Latin noun as being a masculine one. The same error happens with others as well (for example, with *diverticulus/diverticuli for diverticulum/diverticula); it is relevant in scientific contexts where English uses many learned borrowings from New Latin.

Questions about inoculus

What is inoculus the misconstruction of?
Inoculus is the misconstruction of inoculum.
How do you pronounce inoculus?
Inoculus is pronounced /ɪˈnɒkjələs/ (US).

Words near inoculus in the dictionary

  1. inoculents
  2. inoculi
  3. inoculous
  4. inoculum
  5. inoculums
  6. inoculus
  7. inocybe
  8. inode
  9. inodes
  10. inodiate
  11. inodiated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inoculus (page history and authors); inoculum (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.

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