cytosine
/ˈsaɪtəsiːn/noun
cytosine is spelled C-Y-T-O-S-I-N-E. The wrong spelling people search most is cytocine: about 30 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 29 of all searches for the word. Cytosine is a noun meaning “A heterocyclic base, 4-aminopyrimidin-2(1H)-one, which pairs with guanine in DNA and RNA (by means of three…”. The plural of cytosine is cytosines.
How do you spell cytosine?
Cytosine is spelled C-Y-T-O-S-I-N-E. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 29 of the searches for cytosine in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
What does cytosine mean?
noun
- 1
A heterocyclic base, 4-aminopyrimidin-2(1H)-one, which pairs with guanine in DNA and RNA (by means of three hydrogen bonds).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce cytosine?
- /ˈsaɪtəsiːn/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Wodencafe-cytosine.wav, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Tesco250-cytosine.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of cytosine
- cytosines plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is cytosine?
Cytosine appears about once in every 6 million words in written English, the 73,203rd 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).
Cytosine in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense heterocyclic base, 4-aminopyrimidin-2(1H)-one, which pairs with guanine in DNA a:
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 cytosine come from?
After German Cytosin, equivalent to Ancient Greek κύτος (kútos) + -ine. Cytosine was discovered and named by the German biochemists Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann in 1894 when it was hydrolyzed from calf thymus tissues.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).