pepsin
/ˈpɛpsɪn/noun
pepsin is a noun meaning “A digestive enzyme that chemically digests, or breaks down, proteins into shorter chains of amino acids” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-E-P-S-I-N, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of pepsin is pepsins.
What does pepsin mean?
noun
- 1
A digestive enzyme that chemically digests, or breaks down, proteins into shorter chains of amino acids.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce pepsin?
- /ˈpɛpsɪn/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-pepsin.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of pepsin
- pepsins plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is pepsin?
Pepsin appears about once in every 15 million words in written English, the 118,441st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Pepsin in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense digestive enzyme:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does pepsin come from?
From German Pepsin, corresponding to Ancient Greek πέψις (pépsis, “digestion”) + -in.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).