Word of the Day:
pellagra
What It Means
A disease characterised by skin lesions and mental confusion, primarily caused by a niacin deficiency.
Pellagra 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?
From Italian pellagra, from Latin pellis (“skin”) + Ancient Greek ἄγρα (ágra, “seizure, attack, catching”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pellagra (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: “pellagra.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pellagra. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
