rickettsia

rickettsia noun: any of a group of gram-negative bacteria, of the genus Rickettsia, carried as parasites by ticks, fleas and lice, that cause typhus and other diseases.

Image: Clarisse Rovery, Philippe Brouqui, Didier Raoult, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

rickettsia (plural rickettsias or rickettsiae)

Any of a group of gram-negative bacteria, of the genus Rickettsia, carried as parasites by ticks, fleas and lice, that cause typhus and other diseases.
(informal) Any bacterium of the order Rickettsiales.

rickettsia meaning in Arabic and Indonesian

rickettsia in Arabic

Rickettsia-genus bacterium: رِكِتْسِيَا rikitsiyā, رِيكِتْسِيَّة rīkitsiyya, رِيكِتْسِيَا rīkitsiyā

rickettsia in Indonesian

Rickettsia-genus bacterium: riketsia

Forms of rickettsia

plural	rickettsias
plural	rickettsiae

Origin of rickettsia

Borrowed from translingual Rickettsia (genus name), from Howard Taylor Ricketts, equivalent to Ricketts + -ia.

Words formed from rickettsia

Questions about rickettsia

What does rickettsia mean?: Rickettsia means any of a group of gram-negative bacteria, of the genus Rickettsia, carried as parasites by ticks, fleas and lice, that cause typhus and other diseases.
What is rickettsia in Arabic?: Rickettsia in Arabic is رِكِتْسِيَا (rikitsiyā), رِيكِتْسِيَّة (rīkitsiyya), رِيكِتْسِيَا (rīkitsiyā). See Rickettsia meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is rickettsia?: Rickettsia is a noun.
What is the plural of rickettsia?: The plural of rickettsia is rickettsias.

Words near rickettsia in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: rickettsia (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: 2026-09-02

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