Saccharoses

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A class of carbohydrates, specifically sugars, that includes sucrose and is often utilized in biological processes
2. These organic compounds, typically sweet-tasting, are critical for providing energy in living organisms
3. Sugars that can participate in various metabolic pathways and are essential for cellular functions in both plants and animals

Etymology: The word is a plural, the form used for several kinds of sugar at once, so its story lies in the singular "saccharose". That name is a chemist's construction built from two pieces. Its first part, "saccharo-", comes from a Sanskrit word for gravel or grit, "śárkarā", which passed through Pali and Ancient Greek ("sákkhar") and then into Latin as "saccharon" and "saccharum", the sources of English "sugar" and its relatives. The second part, "-ose", was the suffix chemists adopted for sugars, as in "glucose", which entered French from Greek "gleûkos" meaning "sweet wine". So "saccharose" is simply a modern, systematic label for ordinary table sugar, built by joining the ancient word for sugar to the chemical sugar ending. The plural form in the question refers to the family of compounds that share that suffix.

Synonyms: sugars, disaccharides