Dictionary

sputum en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /ˈspjutəm/
• (Southern-England) audio

Etymology

From New Latin, from Latin sputum (“that which is spit out, spittle”), from spuere (“to spit”).

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) Matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth, composed of saliva and discharges from the respiratory passages such as mucus, phlegm or pus.
   • In the early 1890s the work in the laboratory consisted of postmortems, urinalyses, and examination of sputums. 2018, Louis Rosenfeld, Four Centuries of Clinical Chemistry:
   • At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the boy’s sputum sat for a month, waiting for its turn in a slow process of antibody-matching analysis. 2020 February 24, James Hablin, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus”, in The Atlantic:
   • According to the internet, tuberculosis is an infectious disease of the lungs, which causes fever, night sweats, weight loss, and mostly "cough with blood-containing sputum." I also found out that, in the old days, about half the people who got it died. I'm not super clear on when that was, but I assume that it means back before they had antibiotics to knock out the bacteria that cause TB. Keenan is still on antibiotics, despit the fact that he's better now and doesn't have to lie around his dad's backyard anymore. I also looked up sputum, but out of respect to Keenan, I'm not going to talk about it, even though it's a pretty cool word. Sometimes, when nobody's around except Barney Two, I say it out loud and think about the sound and not the meaning. It's actually kind of majestic, like some mythological creature—Sputum the Enchanted Dragon, who flies around the kingdom propelled by mighty wings. In reality, the only creatures that fly over Centrelight are the seagulls, and they're almost as gross as what septum really is. (And what they drop everywhere is even worse.) 2020, Gordon Korman, Notorious, page 43:

Forms

Deriveds

hemosputum

Translations (33)

cs sputum (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · cs chrchel (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · gl esgarro (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · tr balgam (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · hu köpet (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ka ნერწყვი (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ca esput (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ka შისველე (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · lad balgam (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · vi đờm (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ba ҡаҡырыҡ (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · uk мокро́та (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · de Sputum (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · hu váladék (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · pl plwocina (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · bg храчки (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ka დორბლი (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · es escupitajo (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · es gargajo (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · vi đàm (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · uk мокроти́ння (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ru мокрота (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · grc πτύσμα (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · gl lapo (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · es lapo (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · fi yskös (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · pt escarro (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · ko 가래 (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · es esputo (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · hy խորխ (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · kix vēuhàk (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · sw balaghamu (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth) · sw kohozi (matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth)