avidity
/əˈvɪdɪti
/noun [mass noun]
1Keen interest or enthusiasm: he read detective stories with avidity...
- Over the years I have read with avidity various intellectual disputes in The New York Review of Books and other literary journals.
- With a tractable reading list in front of me my impatience with reading turned quickly into avidity.
- The euro seems to be reviled with avidity and fervour wherever one goes, from Holland to the Med.
Synonyms
enthusiasm, keenness, eagerness, avidness, ardour, fervour, passion, zeal, zealousness, fanaticism, voracity, voraciousness;
appetite, hunger, thirst
rare fervency, ardency, passionateness
2 Biochemistry The overall strength of binding between an antibody and an antigen.If infection is established (infection greater than about 4 months), this agent will have a lesser ability to disrupt the complexes because of high antibody avidity (binding strength)....
- To improve the diagnosis of illness caused by B 19 and to discriminate primary from secondary infection, a protein denaturing assay for avidity of erythrovirus-specific IgG antibodies or measurement of IgG subclass, can be used.
- Because of the low avidity of the antibody, HSF1 needed to be enriched prior to western blot.
Origin
Late Middle English: from French avidité or Latin aviditas, from avidus 'eager, greedy'.
Rhymes
- freestyler
- free suitor
- free-swimming
- freetail
- free-tailed
- free-tailed bat
- free television
- free text
- freethinker
- freethinking
- free-thought
- free throw
- free-throw circle
- free-throw lane
- free-to-air
- Freetown
- free trade
- free-trader
- free-trading
- free-tradist
- free transfer
- free TV
- free union
- free university
- free variable