What does chyme mean?
Chyme is the thick, semi-fluid mass produced when food has been mechanically and chemically broken down in the stomach. As gastric muscles churn the meal and digestive juices such as hydrochloric acid act on it, the food is transformed into a pulpy mixture known to physiologists as chyme. This substance then passes through the pyloric sphincter into the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine, where bile and pancreatic enzymes continue the work of digestion. The term belongs firmly to the vocabulary of anatomy, physiology, and medicine, and it seldom appears in everyday speech. Its name derives from the Greek word for juice, reflecting early ideas about digestion as a process of transforming food into bodily fluids. Though narrow in scope, chyme is a precise and well-established term, essential reading for anyone studying how the digestive system converts a meal into absorbable nutrients.
nounThe thick, semi-fluid mass of partially digested food that passes from the stomach into the small intestine, where its digestion continues.
- The semi-fluid mass of partly digested food expelled by the stomach into the duodenum.
"As the stomach's muscular walls contracted, the meal was gradually churned into chyme before being released into the duodenum."
"The pyloric sphincter releases chyme into the small intestine in controlled spurts."
"Because chyme is highly acidic, the duodenum neutralizes it with bicarbonate from the pancreas."
Chyme is almost always treated as uncountable; the plural form exists technically but is rarely encountered outside specialized texts.
"Samples of chymes from different regions of the intestine were compared under the microscope."
Every meal you've ever eaten was churned into a greyish soup called chyme before your body would accept it — and the word comes from the ancient Greek for 'juice.'
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of chyme
Chyme entered English in the early seventeenth century via New Latin, borrowed from the ancient Greek word chȳmós, meaning 'juice' — a term the Greeks applied broadly to plant saps and bodily humors. The same Greek root gives us chyle, the milky intestinal lymph, which shares both the origin and the anatomical neighborhood of chyme. The word reflects the long-standing humoral tradition in Western medicine, in which digestion was understood as the conversion of food into the body's vital juices.
How chyme is actually used
Chyme is a technical term used almost exclusively in anatomy, physiology, and medicine; it rarely appears outside scientific writing. It is uncountable in typical usage.
Easily confused with chyme
Chyme is the semi-digested food mass leaving the stomach, whereas chyle is the milky lymph fluid absorbed by the intestines after fats have been digested.