Digestive means to do with breaking food down in the body. The digestive system, digestive enzymes, digestive problems.
The digestive system runs from mouth to anus and is about nine metres long in an adult. Digestive enzymes break food into molecules small enough to absorb. In Britain a digestive is also a plain sweet biscuit, so named because early ones contained sodium bicarbonate and were thought to aid digestion — a claim long abandoned, though the name stayed. Note digest, digestion.
1adjectivedigestiveTo do with breaking food down in the body.
“Fibre helps keep your digestive system healthy.”
2nounplainA plain sweet biscuit, in British use.
“She dipped a digestive in her tea, and half of it broke off into the cup.”
digestive is a quality relating to digestion.
Latin digestivus comes from digerere, to separate or arrange. The biscuit took the name from a nineteenth-century claim about aiding digestion.
Latin
dīgestīvus
Old French
digestif
English, today
digestive
From Old French digestif, from Latin dīgestīvus. a doublet of digestif.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Word Building