Pancreas

How to spell pancreas

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pancreas

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pancreas mean?

1. nounThe gland behind the stomach that produces digestive enzymes and the hormone insulin.

Pancreas in a sentence

• The surgeon explained that the pancreas sits just behind the stomach.

• In diabetes, the pancreas fails to produce enough insulin.

Where does pancreas come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Pancreas comes straight from the Greek pankreas, a compound of pan, meaning 'all', and kreas, meaning 'flesh' or 'meat'. Greek anatomists chose the name because the organ is a uniformly soft, fleshy gland with no bone or cartilage running through it, so it seemed to be 'all flesh'. The word passed into Latin in the same form and was adopted into English in the late 1500s by medical writers describing the body's organs. The kreas root also survives in 'creatine' and 'creatinine', the muscle-derived compounds whose names likewise point back to flesh. For spellers the trap is the quiet ending: the word sounds like 'pang-kree-us' but is written -eas, and the second 'a' is an easily forgotten letter.

How the word is built

• pan- (all)
• kreas (flesh, meat)