noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A digestive enzyme that chemically digests, or breaks down, proteins into shorter chains of amino acids. countable, uncountable
2. 2
   an enzyme produced in the stomach that splits proteins into peptones wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

enzymeferment

Etymology

From German Pepsin, corresponding to Ancient Greek πέψις (pépsis, “digestion”) + -in.

Related phrases

pepsinhydrochloric acidamino acid

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