thymine

/ˈθaɪmiːn/

thymine noun: a heterocyclic base, 5-methylpyrimidine-2,4(1H,3H)-dione; it pairs with adenine in DNA.

Image: NEUROtiker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

thymine (countable and uncountable, plural thymines)

A heterocyclic base, 5-methylpyrimidine-2,4(1H,3H)-dione; it pairs with adenine in DNA.
- Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written — adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine.1997, Ian McEwan, Enduring Love, Vintage (1998), page 164
- In a recent paper on homopyrimidine decamers containing aeg-monomers and thymine monomers with a sulfomethyl substituent at the γ-position, similar triplexes has also been described [43 ].2015 October 16, “Polyanionic Carboxyethyl Peptide Nucleic Acids ( ce -PNAs): Synthesis and DNA Binding”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI

தைமின்

plural	thymines

From thymus + -ine. Thymine was first isolated in 1893 by Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann from calves' thymus glands, hence its name.

What does thymine mean?: Thymine means a heterocyclic base, 5-methylpyrimidine-2,4(1H,3H)-dione; it pairs with adenine in DNA.
What is thymine in Tamil?: Thymine in Tamil is தைமின். See Thymine meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is thymine?: Thymine is a noun.
How do you pronounce thymine?: Thymine is pronounced /ˈθaɪmiːn/.
What is the plural of thymine?: The plural of thymine is thymines.

Adapted from Wiktionary: thymine (page history and authors); thymine (Tamil Wiktionary) (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

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Tesco250-thymine.wav.

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