seitan
/ˈseɪtən/noun
seitan is a noun meaning “Specially processed wheat gluten, used as a protein-rich food” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-E-I-T-A-N, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of seitan is seitans.
What does seitan mean?
noun
- 1
Specially processed wheat gluten, used as a protein-rich food.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce seitan?
- /ˈseɪtən/
- /ˈseɪtɑːn/
- /ˈseɪtæn/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-seitan.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of seitan
- seitans plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is seitan?
Seitan 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).
Seitan in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense wheat gluten:
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 seitan come from?
Romaji of the Japanese セイタン which was coined by philosopher George Ohsawa in 1961. Ohsawa also occasionally used the kanji term 生蛋 from 生 (“fresh; raw”) and 蛋, the first character in 蛋白 (tanpaku, “protein”). In Japan, wheat gluten itself is usually referred to as 麩 (fu, “wheat bran, gluten”), while seitan in particular is generally written in katakana as セイタン. Another common term for this is グルテンミート (“gluten meat”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).