Other forms: digested, digests, digesting
To digest is to break food down inside your body. Hard to digest, digest a meal, digestive system.
It also means to absorb information slowly: digest the news, give me time to digest it — and that use is common and useful. As a noun, stressed on the first syllable, a digest is a summary or collection: a weekly digest. Note digestion, digestive, and indigestion; and that a digestive biscuit was named in the nineteenth century for supposedly aiding digestion, which it does not.
1verbdigestTo break food down inside the body.
“Some people find beans hard to digest.”
2verbabsorbTo absorb information slowly.
“Give me about a week to digest the whole report.”
digest is a breaking down.
Latin digerere means to separate or arrange — dis- plus gerere, to carry. Digesting food is sorting it into parts, and a digest of writing is the same act applied to text.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂eǵ-
Latin
dīgestus
Middle English
digesten
English, today
digest
Built from
From Middle English digesten, from Latin dīgestus, past participle of dīgerō (“carry apart”), from dī- (for dis- (“apart”)) + gerō (“to carry”), influenced by Middle French digestion. Partly displaced native meltan (intransitive) and mieltan (transitive), both “to melt, to digest,” whence Modern English melt.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA