Word.ws English Dictionary

pentosan

pentosan noun: any polysaccharide composed of pentoses.

Noun

pentosan (plural pentosans)

  1. Any polysaccharide composed of pentoses.
    • Thanks to its pentosans, rye flour absorbs eight times its weight in water, while wheat flour absorbs two. Unlike starch, the pentosans don't retrograde and harden after being cooked and cooled. So they provide a soft, moist texture that helps gives rye breads a shelf life of weeks.2004, Harold McGee, chapter 9, in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Scribner, →ISBN

Forms of pentosan

pluralpentosans

Words formed from pentosan

Questions about pentosan

What does pentosan mean?
Pentosan means any polysaccharide composed of pentoses.
What part of speech is pentosan?
Pentosan is a noun.
What is the plural of pentosan?
The plural of pentosan is pentosans.

Words near pentosan in the dictionary

  1. pentops
  2. Pentor
  3. pentorex
  4. pentosaceous
  5. pentosalen
  6. pentosan
  7. pentosan polysulfate
  8. pentosane
  9. pentosanes
  10. pentosanpolysulfate
  11. pentosans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pentosan (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pentosan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pentosan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.