Who coined the term virus and what does it mean?

The term "virus" was coined by the Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892. Ivanovsky was studying a disease that affected tobacco plants, known as tobacco mosaic disease. He discovered that the infectious agent could pass through a filter that was fine enough to retain bacteria. This led him to conclude that the agent was not a bacterium, but a new type of infectious agent. He named it "virus," from the Latin word "virus," which means "poison" or "toxin."