Etymology
In what year did the word "viral" come about?
Virus
The word is from the Latin "virus" referring to poison and other noxious substances, first used in English in 1392. "Virulent", from Latin "virulentus" (poisonous), dates to 1400. A meaning of "agent that causes infectious disease" is first recorded in 1728, before the discovery of viruses by Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892. The English plural is "viruses", whereas the Latin word is a mass noun, which has no classically attested plural. The adjective "viral" dates to 1948. The term "virion" (plural "virions"), which dates from 1959, is also used to refer to a single, stable infective viral particle that is released from the cell and is fully capable of infecting other cells of the same type.