sputum

plural sputums · plural sputa

1. countableuncountablemedicineMatter 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

   2 more examples

   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

   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