Word of the Day:
niacin
What It Means
A water-soluble vitamin, a component of vitamin B complex, found in meat, yeast, and dairy products; it is essential to metabolism.
Niacin in Context
“Mixing the alkali into the recipe in the right way chemically releases the otherwise unavailable niacin in the corn, which stops pellagra in its tracks, and allowed corn-based agricultural populations to grow and spread.”
Did You Know?
in 1942 derived from nicotinic + acid + vitamin, chosen to dissociate it from nicotine, to avoid the perception that vitamins or niacin-rich food contains nicotine, or that cigarettes contain vitamins.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: niacin (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “niacin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/niacin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.