Digest

How to spell digest

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce digest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does digest mean?

1. verbTo break down food in the body, or to absorb and make sense of information.
2. nounA compiled summary or condensed collection of written material.

Digest in a sentence

• verb

  A heavy meal can take hours to digest fully.

• noun

  The weekly news digest lands in my inbox every Monday.

• verb

  Give yourself time to digest the report before the meeting.

• noun

  She publishes a monthly digest of legal rulings for busy lawyers.

Where does digest come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb digerere, meaning 'to separate, divide, or distribute', which was built from the prefix dis- 'apart' and the verb gerere 'to carry or bear'. From the idea of carrying things apart and arranging them came the medical sense of the body separating food into useful parts, which is how the modern digestive meaning developed. The past participle digestus also yielded a sense of material that had been carefully sorted and organised, which survives in the noun digest, an orderly summary of writings. English took the word in during the late fourteenth century, drawing on both the Latin original and Old French forms. The same gerere root carries weight in relatives such as 'gesture', 'register', and 'suggest', all involving something carried or brought forward.

How the word is built

• di- (from dis-: apart)
• gest (from gerere: to carry, bear)