antivirusn.adj.
A. n.
1. Med. and Biol. A substance which is active or effective against viruses.
ΚΠ
1914 Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 41 450 It was his opinion that an antivirus or antitoxin was thus formed in the lower, healthy leaves which destroyed or rendered inert the virus of the disease.
1927 H. Plotz tr. A. Besredka Local Immunization 53 The other [substance] is atoxic, thermostable..and antagonizes the former substance. For convenience, we will call this substance, ‘antivirus’.
1949 H. W. Florey et al. Antibiotics I. i. 45 Artificial immunity could be conferred locally on tissues by the use of what he termed an ‘antivirus’, which was prepared from old broth cultures of bacteria.
1993 Trends in Microbiol. 1 355/2 Antiviruses that interfere with HIV propagation could be used as AIDS therapy.
2. Computing. Software designed to detect and remove, or offer protection from, computer viruses. Cf. vaccine n.
ΘΚΠ
society > computing and information technology > software > [noun] > system or utility programmes > other
rollback1954
loader1959
package1964
scheduler1966
post-processor1967
shell1974
disc emulator1977
profiler1977
spooler1979
updater1980
sniffer1986
vaccine1986
antivirus1988
1988 Re: I've got a Virus-fix to halt Spread in comp.sys.mac (Usenet newsgroup) 3 Mar. If anyone has strong feelings about publishing this information (anti-virus could be doubly reverse-engineered) please mail me ASAP.
1994 PC/Computing (Nexis) Dec. 185 It has a variety of utilities, including file unerase, backup, antivirus, disk repair, and a file manager that's better than Windows' own.
1999 E. Afr. Standard (Nairobi) 5 Jan. 19/2 (advt.) Essential Internet software! latest versions of..Winzip, Paintshop, Mediaplayer, Nortons [sic] antivirus.
B. adj. (attrib.).
1. Med. and Biol. Active or effective against viruses; of or relating to an antivirus.
ΚΠ
1929 Sci. Monthly Jan. 61 The antivirus treatment of puerperal complaints has an enormous advantage in being preventive.
1954 I. Asimov Chemicals of Life vi. 91 These anti-virus proteins that the body makes are called antibodies.
1987 Oxf. Textbk. Med. (ed. 2) I. iv. 73/1 Immune (gamma) interferon is also a lymphokine; it is well known for its direct antivirus effect.
2002 Vet. Immunol. & Immunopathol. 87 395 Orf virus encodes a range of immuno-modulatory genes that interfere with host anti-virus immune and inflammatory effector mechanisms.
2. Computing. Designating or involving software designed to protect a computer or network against virus entry or to detect and remove existing viruses.
ΚΠ
1988 comp.sys.apple (Usenet newsgroup) 13 Jan. (title of posting) Anti-virus Assurance.
1993 Compute Oct. 53 (advt.) The automatic antivirus scan detects nearly twice as many viruses as MS-DOS.
2000 ‘Dr. K.’ Compl. Hacker's Handbk. x. 141 Anti-virus software detects and removes viruses either by looking for a ‘viral signature’, a string of bytes unique to that virus, or by using heuristic rules to look for ‘viral behaviour’.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, December 2003; most recently modified version published online November 2010).
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n.adj.1914