noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A sugar or saccharide containing five carbon atoms.

   "Ribose, found in RNA, is a common pentose."

2. 2
   any monosaccharide sugar containing five atoms of carbon per molecule wordnet

Example

More examples

"Ribose, found in RNA, is a common pentose."

Etymology

Internationalism, from penta- (“five”) + -ose.

Related phrases

pentose phosphate pathway

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.