Cholesterol

How to spell cholesterol

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce cholesterol

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cholesterol mean?

1. nounA waxy, fatty substance found in the blood and body tissues, high levels of which are linked to heart disease.

Cholesterol in a sentence

• The doctor warned that his cholesterol was higher than it should be.

• Switching to oily fish and oats helped lower her cholesterol.

Where does cholesterol come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word was assembled by scientists from Greek building blocks. The first part comes from khole, the Greek word for bile, and the middle from stereos, meaning solid or stiff, because the substance was first identified as a solid, fatty material found in gallstones. The French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul named it cholesterine around 1815, combining bile and solid to describe a waxy substance recovered from bile. Later in the nineteenth century the ending was changed to -ol, the standard chemical suffix that signals an alcohol, once the substance was understood to belong to that chemical family, giving the modern form cholesterol. The spelling trap lives in that classical core: the silent-looking ch- pronounced as a hard k, the unstressed second vowel, and the -ol rather than -al ending that betrays its true status as an alcohol.

How the word is built

• chole- (bile)
• stere- (solid, from stereos)
• -ol (chemical suffix marking an alcohol)