Diet

How to spell diet

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce diet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diet mean?

1. nounThe kinds and amounts of food that a person or animal habitually eats.
2. verbTo restrict the food one eats in order to lose weight.

Diet in a sentence

• noun

  A balanced diet should include plenty of vegetables.

• verb

  She decided to diet before the wedding in June.

• noun

  The doctor said his high cholesterol was linked to a poor diet.

• verb

  He tends to diet every January after the holidays.

Where does diet come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek diaita, which literally meant 'a way of life' or 'mode of living', covering everything from daily habits to the regimen prescribed by a physician. Greek physicians used it for the whole pattern of food and exercise that kept a patient healthy, and that medical sense narrowed over time toward the foods a person regularly eats. It passed into Latin as diaeta and then into Old French as diete before reaching English in the 1200s. A separate but visually identical word, also spelled diet, comes from the medieval Latin dieta meaning a day's work or a day appointed for an assembly, which is why a national legislature such as the Japanese Diet carries the name. The spelling trap is the quiet i-then-e vowel pair pronounced as two syllables, which is easy to flip or run together.

How the word is built

• diet (from Greek diaita: a way of living, regimen)