Saliva is the liquid your mouth makes when food is near. It starts digestion before you have swallowed anything.
It contains enzymes that begin breaking down starch, which is why bread starts to taste sweet if you hold it in your mouth. The everyday word is spit, which is blunter, and the verb salivate means to produce it. Dogs salivating at a bell is the most famous experiment in psychology. A saliva test is now a routine way of taking a DNA sample.
1nounsalivaThe watery liquid produced in the mouth.
“The sample was taken from saliva.”
Also accepted in games: spit
Saliva is Latin salīva, spittle, and where that came from is genuinely unknown. One suggestion links it to a root meaning dirt or dirty.
Proto-Indo-European
*salw-
Middle English
salive
Latin
salīva — spittle
English, today
saliva
Built from
A Latin salīva (“spittle”), replacing or merging with Middle English salive, salve (“saliva”), from the same Latin source. Further origin unknown. Perhaps from Proto-Indo-European salw-, sal- (“dirt, dirty”), cognate with Old English salu (“dark, dusky”). More at sallow. Displaced slaver, slavere "saliva"; whence Modern slaver; and spyttle, spetel, spatel, spotel "saliva"; whence Modern spittle, spettle, spattle.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA