Digestive

How to spell digestive

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce digestive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does digestive mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the process of breaking down food in the body, or aiding that process.
2. nounA semi-sweet wholemeal biscuit, traditionally believed to aid digestion.

Digestive in a sentence

• adjective

  The doctor explained how the digestive system absorbs nutrients from food.

• noun

  She dunked a chocolate digestive into her morning cup of tea.

• adjective

  Chronic stress can disrupt normal digestive function for weeks.

• noun

  The recipe uses a crushed digestive base under the cheesecake filling.

Where does digestive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb digerere, meaning literally 'to carry apart' or 'to separate and distribute', built from the prefix di- (a form of dis-, meaning apart) and gerere (to carry). The Romans used it for dividing and arranging things, and from there it came to describe the body's work of breaking food down and distributing its goodness. English took the adjective digestivus, by way of Old French digestif, in the late 1300s, when medieval medicine was much concerned with how the stomach 'cooked' and sorted food. The same gerere root quietly powers a surprising family of English words, including 'gesture', 'register', and 'suggest', all of which involve carrying something in some sense. In Britain the word also became attached to a plain wheat biscuit once thought to aid digestion, which is why the single 's' and the soft 'g' both deserve a second look when you spell it.

How the word is built

• di- (variant of dis-, apart)
• gest (from Latin gerere, to carry)
• -ive (adjective suffix)