Uptake

How to spell uptake

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce uptake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does uptake mean?

1. nounThe rate or amount at which something is taken in, absorbed, or adopted.
2. nounThe capacity to understand or learn something quickly, chiefly in the phrase 'quick on the uptake'.

Uptake in a sentence

• The clinic tracked vaccine uptake across the region.

• The new recruit was quick on the uptake and needed little training.

• Plants need nitrogen for healthy water uptake through the roots.

• Being slow on the uptake in meetings cost him several chances.

Where does uptake come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is a transparent native compound, formed in English from the everyday particle 'up' and the verb 'take'. The verb 'take' is itself a borrowing from Old Norse 'taka', meaning 'to grasp, seize, or lay hold of', which entered English during the period of Scandinavian settlement and gradually pushed aside the older Old English 'niman'. The noun 'uptake' first appeared in the 1500s as a literal term for a passage or flue that carries smoke or air upward, and that mechanical sense survives in engineering. By the 1800s it had spread into the figurative idiom 'quick on the uptake', meaning fast to understand, and into scientific language for the rate at which a body or system absorbs a substance. Because both parts are plain English words written exactly as they sound, the only real spelling decision is whether to join them, and modern usage settles firmly on the single solid form 'uptake'.

How the word is built

• up- (upward, adverbial particle)
• take (to grasp or seize, from Old Norse taka)