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biopsy

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈbaɪɑpsi//

The removal and examination of a sample of tissue, cells, or bodily fluid from a living body for diagnostic purposes.

noun

  1. 1

    The removal and examination of a sample of tissue, cells, or bodily fluid from a living body for diagnostic purposes.

    We will need to perform a biopsy to determine whether the tumour is malignant or benign.

    All the while he was talking, he took lots of biopsies, small samples of tissue to be examined by pathologists using a microscope.

Etymology

From French biopsie, from bi- + -opsy.

verb

  1. 1

    To take a sample (a biopsy) for pathological examination.

    They biopsied the lump but it turned out to be non-cancerous.

Forms

plural
biopsies
past tense
biopsied
past participle
biopsied
present participle
biopsying
third person singular
biopsies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).