Glucose

How to spell glucose

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce glucose

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does glucose mean?

1. nounA simple sugar that is a key source of energy for the body and circulates in the blood.

Glucose in a sentence

• The nurse checked his blood glucose before breakfast.

• Athletes rely on glucose for quick energy during a race.

Where does glucose come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Glucose entered English in the middle of the nineteenth century straight from French, where the chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas coined glucose around 1838 to name the simple sugar found in grapes and honey. He built the term on the Greek gleukos, which meant 'sweet new wine' or unfermented grape must, a word closely tied to glykys, the ordinary Greek adjective for 'sweet'. That same sweetness root surfaces in other English words such as glycerine and glycogen, all pointing back to the idea of sweet taste. The ending -ose was already the standard chemical badge for sugars, which is why glucose sits alongside fructose, lactose, and sucrose in the same naming family. For spelling, it helps to remember the soft middle is a plain -c- followed by -ose, not the -k- sound spelled with a k, and that the word ends in the sugar suffix -ose rather than -ouse or -oce.

How the word is built

• gluc- (from Greek gleukos: sweet new wine, must)
• -ose (chemical suffix marking a sugar)