What does "digest" mean?
Digest: (Physiol.) To separate (the food) in its passage through the alimentary canal into the nutritive and nonnutritive elements; to prepare, by the action of the digestive juices, for conversion into blood; to convert into chyme.
Additional senses
- 2.To think over and arrange methodically in the mind; to reduce to a plan or method; to receive in the mind and consider carefully; to get an understanding of; to comprehend. Feelingly digest the words you speak in prayer. Sir H. Sidney. How shall this bosom multiplied digest The senate's courtesy Shak.
- 3.To appropriate for strengthening and comfort. Grant that we may in such wise hear them [the Scriptures], read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. Book of Common Prayer.
- 4.Hence: To bear comfortably or patiently; to be reconciled to; to brook. I never can digest the loss of most of Origin's works. Coleridge.
- 5.(Chem.) To soften by heat and moisture; to expose to a gentle heat in a boiler or matrass, as a preparation for chemical operations.
- 6.(Med.) To dispose to suppurate, or generate healthy pus, as an ulcer or wound.
- 7.To ripen; to mature. [Obs.] Well-digested fruits. Jer. Taylor.
- 8.To quiet or abate, as anger or grief.
- 9.To undergo digestion; as, food digests well or ill.
- 10.(Med.) To suppurate; to generate pus, as an ulcer.
- 11.That which is digested; especially, that which is worked over, classified, and arranged under proper heads or titles; esp. (Law), a compilation of statutes or decisions analytically arranged. The term is applied in a general sense to the Pandects of Justinian (see Pandect), but is also specially given by authors to compilations of laws on particular topics; a summary of laws; as, Comyn's Digest; the United States Digest. A complete digest of Hindu and Mahommedan laws after the model of Justinian's celebrated Pandects. Sir W. Jones. They made a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man. Burke.
Sources
- Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition (public domain, via GCIDE / Project Gutenberg).
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- Published: 2026-07-17 · Modified: 2026-07-17