Ingredient

How to spell ingredient

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce ingredient

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ingredient mean?

1. nounAny one of the foods or substances combined to make a particular dish or mixture.

Ingredient in a sentence

• The recipe lists flour as the first ingredient.

• She checked the label for any ingredient that might cause an allergy.

Where does ingredient come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin ingrediens, the present participle of the verb ingredi, which literally meant 'to step into' or 'to enter', formed from in- 'into' and gradi 'to walk or step'. In Latin cooking and medicine the idea was of something that 'goes into' a mixture, and that practical sense carried straight through. English adopted it in the early 1400s, at first largely in recipes and the preparation of medicines, where an ingredient was one of the components that entered the blend. The same gradi root walks through a whole family of English words, including 'grade', 'gradual', 'progress' and 'ingress', all of which share the underlying notion of stepping or moving. Knowing that the ending traces back to the Latin participle ending helps explain why it is spelled -ent rather than -ant, the trap that most often catches careful writers.

How the word is built

• in- (into)
• gredi (to step, walk, from Latin gradi)
• -ent (noun suffix)