Peptide

How to spell peptide

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce peptide

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does peptide mean?

1. nounA short chain of two or more amino acids joined by chemical bonds, smaller than a full protein.

Peptide in a sentence

• The lab synthesised a short peptide to test the new drug.

• Each peptide in the sample was separated by mass spectrometry.

Where does peptide come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern scientific word, assembled by chemists rather than inherited from older speech. Its root is the Greek peptos, meaning 'cooked' or 'digested', which is itself related to the verb peptein, 'to soften, ripen or digest'. The same root gave nineteenth century biochemistry the word 'peptone', a name for the soluble products formed when proteins are broken down during digestion. From peptone, German researchers around 1900 coined Peptid for the short chains of amino acids linked by what we now call peptide bonds, attaching the chemical suffix -ide that names a related class of compounds. English borrowed the term almost unchanged, so the spelling preserves the Greek 'pept' stem; remembering the digestive sense of peptos helps fix that opening 'pep'.

How the word is built

• pept- (from Greek peptos: digested, cooked)
• -ide (chemical suffix marking a class of compound)