actinomycosis
noun
actinomycosis is a noun meaning “An infectious bacterial disease of cattle and swine, sometimes transmitted to humans, characterized by the formation of painful abscesses in the…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-C-T-I-N-O-M-Y-C-O-S-I-S and has 6 syllables, and it appears about once in every 91 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of actinomycosis is actinomycoses.
What does actinomycosis mean?
noun
- 1
An infectious bacterial disease of cattle and swine, sometimes transmitted to humans, characterized by the formation of painful abscesses in the mouth, lungs, or gastrointestinal tract, caused by Actinomyces israelii, Actinomyces gerencseriae, and Propionibacterium propionicum.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce actinomycosis?
- General-American
Actinomycosis has 6 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Yangolin-actinomycosis.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of actinomycosis
- actinomycoses plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is actinomycosis?
Actinomycosis appears about once in every 91 million words in written English, the 305,310th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Actinomycosis in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense infectious disease:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | actinomycose |
| Portuguese | actinomicose |
| Spanish | actinomicosis |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does actinomycosis come from?
From taxonomic name Actinomyces + -osis.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).