yeast
noun · verb
Simple meaning
An often humid, yellowish froth produced by fermenting malt worts, and used to brew beer, leaven bread, and also used in certain medicines.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
yeestIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈjist
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
An often humid, yellowish froth produced by fermenting malt worts, and used to brew beer, leaven bread, and also used in certain medicines.
A single-celled fungus of a wide variety of taxonomic families.
A compressed cake or dried granules of this substance used for mixing with flour to make bread dough rise.
Brewer's yeast, certain species of Saccharomyces, principally Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Saccharomyces carlsbergensis.
Candida, a ubiquitous fungus that can cause various kinds of infections in humans.
The resulting infection, candidiasis.
verb
To ferment.
of something prepared with a yeasted dough
To rise.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: An often humid, yellowish froth produced by fermenting malt worts, and used to brew beer, leaven bread, and also used in certain medicines.
Used this way, yeast is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in technical or specialist writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Nearby words
- barm , rarer, so it draws attention
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use yeast
- “You need yeast to make bread rise properly in the oven.”
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More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: often humid
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.