Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Pepsin
/ˈpɛpsɪn/noun
The stomach enzyme that breaks proteins into shorter chains.
The Greek roots
πέψις
pépsis
digestion, cooking
Literally: “the digesting substance”
Follow a root:πέψις2 words
The story of the word
Theodor Schwann isolated the active principle of gastric juice in 1836 and named it from πέψις, making it one of the first enzymes ever identified. Greek medicine treated digestion as cooking done inside the body, which is why one verb covers both, and why food that failed to digest was called ἄπεπτος, uncooked. Dyspepsia is bad cooking. The drink was named in 1898 on the claim that it settled exactly that.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
dyspepsiapepticpeptide
In a sentence
Pepsin only works in acid, so it switches off as soon as food leaves the stomach.