Intake

How to spell intake

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce intake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does intake mean?

1. nounThe amount of something, especially food, drink or air, that is taken into the body or a system.
2. nounA group of people admitted or accepted into an institution at the same time.
3. nounAn opening or pipe through which a fluid or gas is drawn into a machine or system.

Intake in a sentence

• The dietitian advised her to lower her daily salt intake.

• The university welcomed its largest intake of students this autumn.

• Debris had blocked the air intake on the engine.

• Reducing your calorie intake will help with the diet.

• The hospital trained the new intake of nurses over six weeks.

• The water intake for the reservoir sits below the surface.

Where does intake come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Intake is a transparent compound formed inside English by reversing the everyday phrasal verb 'take in', so the meaning is simply 'that which is taken in'. The 'take' half traces back to the Old Norse verb taka, meaning 'to grasp, seize or accept', which the Vikings carried into northern England and which gradually displaced the native Old English niman. The noun intake itself is comparatively young: it appears from the 1700s and 1800s, first in northern dialect for a piece of land enclosed or 'taken in' from a moor, then in engineering for a point where water or air is drawn into a system. From there it broadened to the quantity of anything absorbed, such as food, fluid or breath, and in British usage to a group of people admitted together. Because the spelling is just 'in' bolted onto the very familiar 'take', the only real trap is remembering it is written as one solid word with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• in- (in, inward)
• take (from Old Norse taka, to grasp or seize)