Naringin

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A bitter-tasting flavonoid glycoside found mainly in grapefruit and other citrus fruits, responsible for their characteristic taste
2. A bitter plant compound of the flavonoid class, occurring chiefly in grapefruit peel and pulp and in some other citrus species
3. A naturally occurring glycoside that gives grapefruit and related citrus fruits their distinctive bitter flavour

Etymology: The "naring-" of this compound comes from a word for the bitter orange, which traces back through a long chain of languages. The Sanskrit "nāraṅga" for the orange tree passed into Persian and Arabic as "nāranj," then into Spanish as "naranja," and it is the same root behind the English "orange." The bitter orange's own botanical name was "naringi," and chemists took that stem when they isolated the compound from the fruit's pith and peel. The ending "-in" is the standard chemical suffix used for many plant-derived substances, so it marks the compound as a product extracted from a plant rather than a word with any deeper history of its own. It is what gives the name its bitter-tasting character in grapefruit, which is where the compound is most familiar, and it explains why the word sounds like a fancy cousin of "orange" to anyone who knows the fruit's older names.