sputum

1. (physiology) Matter coughed up and expectorated from the mouth, composed of saliva and discharges from the respiratory passages such as mucus, phlegm or pus.Examples: "In the early 1890s the work in the laboratory consisted of postmortems, urinalyses, and examination of sputums."; "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."countableuncountable