Phrase guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
No pronunciation record was provided for this word.
noun
A bile acid, C24H40O4, present in human bile at low concentrations and used as a medication for the treatment of various biliary and liver diseases.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: uncountable
Topics: chemistry, natural-sciences, organic-chemistry, physical-sciences
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: UDCA, ursodiol
Antonyms: none provided
History
Calque of German Ursodesoxycholsäure; equivalent to Latin urs(us) (“bear”) + deoxycholic acid. In 1901–1902, Swedish biochemist Olof Hammarsten isolated an unknown bile acid from polar bear bile at Uppsala University, naming it Ursocholeinsäure (in German) in a two-part paper in Hoppe-Seyler's Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie. In 1927, Japanese researcher Masato Shoda crystallized the compound from a commercial preparation of Asian black bear bile and found it to be an isomer of deoxycholic acid, renaming it Ursodesoxycholsäure (in German) in a paper in The Journal of Biochemistry.
Across languages
5 source translations are retained for this English entry.
