Digestion

How to spell digestion

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce digestion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does digestion mean?

1. nounThe bodily process of breaking down food in the stomach and intestines so it can be absorbed.

Digestion in a sentence

• A slow walk after dinner can aid digestion.

• Rich, fatty meals tend to make digestion feel sluggish.

Where does digestion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb digerere, which literally meant 'to carry apart' or 'to separate and distribute', formed from the prefix dis- (apart) and gerere (to carry or bear). The Romans extended the idea of separating and arranging things to the way the body breaks food down and distributes its goodness, giving the noun digestio. English took the word in the late 1300s, partly through Old French digestion and partly straight from the Latin, keeping its medical sense of processing food in the stomach. The same gerere root sits quietly inside relatives like 'gesture' and 'register', all built on the notion of carrying or bearing something. A useful spelling reminder is that the soft middle 'g' is followed by 'estion', not 'estian', and the 't' before 'ion' is the same pattern seen in 'suggestion' and 'congestion'.

How the word is built

• di- (apart, from dis-)
• gest (from Latin gerere: to carry)
• -ion (noun of action)