peptone
/ˈpɛptoʊn/noun
peptone is a noun meaning “Any water-soluble mixture of polypeptides and amino acids formed by the partial hydrolysis of protein” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-E-P-T-O-N-E, and it appears about once in every 40 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of peptone is peptones.
What does peptone mean?
noun
- 1
Any water-soluble mixture of polypeptides and amino acids formed by the partial hydrolysis of protein.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce peptone?
- US /ˈpɛptoʊn/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-peptone.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of peptone
- peptones plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is peptone?
Peptone appears about once in every 40 million words in written English, the 194,306th 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).
Peptone in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense water-soluble product of partial protein hydrolysis:
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 peptone come from?
From German Pepton, from Ancient Greek πεπτόν (peptón, “cooked, digested”) derived from πέπτω (péptō, “soften, ripen, boil, cook, bake, digest”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).