Word.ws English Dictionary

psychrotrophic

/ˌsaɪkɹəˈtɹəʊfɪk/

psychrotrophic adjective: describing microorganisms that thrive in a cold environment.

Adjective

psychrotrophic (comparative more psychrotrophic, superlative most psychrotrophic)

  1. Describing microorganisms that thrive in a cold environment.
    • One of the main reasons fridge temperatures are recommend to be set at 5ºC is because of listeria. Listeria is a food poisoning bacterium that is psychrotrophic – in other words it likes cold temperatures. From the growth models, we know that listeria grows nearly twice as fast at 8°C as it does at...2018 January 15, Kaarin Goodburn, “How chilled is your fridge?”, in Food Standards Agency

Forms of psychrotrophic

comparativemore psychrotrophic
superlativemost psychrotrophic

Origin of psychrotrophic

From psychro- (“cold”) + -trophic (“growth”).

Questions about psychrotrophic

What does psychrotrophic mean?
Psychrotrophic means describing microorganisms that thrive in a cold environment.
What part of speech is psychrotrophic?
Psychrotrophic is an adjective.
How do you pronounce psychrotrophic?
Psychrotrophic is pronounced /ˌsaɪkɹəˈtɹəʊfɪk/.

Words near psychrotrophic in the dictionary

  1. psychrotherapy
  2. psychrotolerance
  3. psychrotolerant
  4. psychrotolerants
  5. psychrotroph
  6. psychrotrophic
  7. psychrotrophs
  8. psychroxerophytic
  9. psychs
  10. psychs out
  11. psychs up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: psychrotrophic (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: “psychrotrophic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/psychrotrophic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.