What does "prebiotic" mean?

A substance in food that is hard to digest and promotes the growth of beneficial intestinal microorganisms.

Prebiotic

adj, noun

adj, noun ·4 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level

Noun

1
A substance in food that is hard to digest and promotes the growth of beneficial intestinal microorganisms. in-plural
"The table below includes plant foods we consider to be prebiotic “stars” since they are the foods listed in the scientific literature as sources of prebiotics."

Adjective

1
Before the advent of life. not-comparable
"There are three compelling reasons that suggest that the first set of prebiotic coding sequences to be translated were repeats of base oligomers, the numbers of bases in oligomeric units not being multiples of three."
2
Not digestible, but beneficial. not-comparable
"The table below includes plant foods we consider to be prebiotic “stars” since they are the foods listed in the scientific literature as sources of prebiotics."

"Dragonfly is a drone-like rotorcraft that would explore the prebiotic chemistry and habitability of dozens of sites on Saturn’s moon Titan."

From pre- + biotic.

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