white blood cell
nounDefinition of white blood cell
: any of the blood cells that are colorless, lack hemoglobin, contain a nucleus, and include the lymphocytes, monocytes, neutrophils, eosinophils, and basophils
— called also leukocyte, white blood corpuscle, white cell
— compare red blood cellExamples of white blood cell in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
The responsibility falls largely on the shoulders of T-cells, white blood cells with specialized receptors embedded in their surface that allow them to bind uniquely to diverse peptide fragments. — Quanta Magazine, "Immune Cells Measure Time to Identify Foreign Proteins," 3 June 2019 These include overactive white blood cells and a tendency to diabetes in mice lacking the sialic acid. — San Diego Union-Tribune, "Heart disease is the price of becoming human, UCSD study finds," 22 July 2019 The first method used, which compared antigens on the white blood cells of parents and children, could establish paternity with an accuracy rate of eighty per cent. — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, "The Paternity Reveal," 24 June 2019 During the platelet donation procedure, a machine is used to separate the platelets in your blood from the other red blood cells and white blood cells through a process called apheresis. — NBC News, "Here's what you need to know about donating blood," 14 June 2019 But lymphatic system fluid — which contains white blood cells and plays an important role in protecting the body from germs and disease — flows more slowly and can be helped along manually. — Elizabeth Kiefer, The Seattle Times, "Jade rollers: Puffy-eye wonder cure or sham?," 26 Mar. 2019 The final cataclysm, in this Biblical array of plagues, happened when white blood cells produced by the donor’s marrow mounted a vigorous immune response to the patient’s body. — Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New Yorker, "The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies," 15 July 2019 Antibiotics didn’t exist at the time, but his own white blood cells were able to eradicate the bacteria. — Jerome Groopman, The New York Review of Books, "The Body Strikes Back," 21 Mar. 2019 Medical workers observed that exposure to radiation caused a precipitous drop in the survivors’ white blood cell counts, and experiments in mice showed that bone marrow transplants could offset those losses. — Quanta Magazine, "To Heal Some Wounds, Adult Cells Turn More Fetal," 29 Aug. 2018These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'white blood cell.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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