Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Diastase
/ˈdaɪəsteɪs/noun
An enzyme preparation from malt that breaks starch down into sugar.
The Greek roots
διά
diá
apart, through
στάσις
stásis
a standing, placing
Literally: “a standing apart”
The story of the word
Payen and Persoz separated it from malt in 1833, the first enzyme anyone had isolated, and named it διάστασις, a standing apart, for the way it takes starch to pieces. The suffix on every enzyme since was lifted from this one word: amylase, lactase, protease and the rest all end in the tail of diastase. Diastase itself turned out to be a mixture rather than a substance, and what it mostly contained is now called amylase.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
stasisecstasyapostasystatic
In a sentence
Malting wakes the diastase and the starch starts turning sweet.
Honey is graded partly by how much diastase survives in it.