New Meaning for Ingest - DailyWritingTips

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New Meaning for Ingest Posted: 25 Feb 2014 08:59 PM PST A reader has alerted me to a new use of the verb ingest: Feed is a suite of tools to assist in preparing content for ingest into HathiTrust. I found additional examples of this incomprehensible use of ingest in what are clearly technical contexts: High Speed Smart Data Ingest into Hadoop Fedora digital objects can be encoded in several XML formats for ingest and export. I was ingesting with the cli interface by creating a file that is cli commands Since the 17th century, ingest has been used in English with the meaning “to take in food.” Substances other than food are also said to be ingested. In reference to human beings, ingest is a clinical term for “to eat” or “to swallow.” In figurative usage, it can be simply to “to take in” or “to absorb.” For example, birds are said to be “ingested” by jet engines. A student “ingests” information.” Here are some examples that illustrate the usual meaning of the verb and its different forms: Children ingest considerable amounts of soil Foreign body ingestion is not uncommon in clinical practice, and it may occasionally lead to penetration injuries. The Nature of the Ingested Protein Has No Effect on Lean Body Mass During Energy Restriction in Overweight Rats American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) gives important instructions about what to do if a child has ingested poison. ‘Miami Zombie’ Didn’t Ingest Bath Salts Confirms Autopsy In the context of computer science, ingest seems to have acquired a meaning similar to input. I found this definition of the term “data ingestion” at TechTarget: Data ingestion is the process of obtaining, importing, and processing data for later use or storage in a database. This process often involves altering individual files by editing their content and/or formatting them to fit into a larger document. I often have the feeling that some of the changes in usage like this unfamiliar meaning for ingest are driven by non-native English speakers who translate words from their own languages into English words that don’t necessarily have the same meaning in English. For example, the German verb einnehmen can be translated as “to partake of a meal,” but it also means “to get, receive, collect,” meanings that certainly go along with the definition of “data ingestion.” Apart from computer jargon, ingest still means “to swallow, to consume, to take by mouth.”