ingredient

1. 1.

   a component of a mixture or compound

   Broadercomponent

   Narroweradmixturebase
2. 2.

   an abstract part of something

   “jealousy was a component of his character”

   “two constituents of a musical composition are melody and harmony”

   “the grammatical elements of a sentence”

   “a key factor in her success”

   “humor: an effective ingredient of a speech”

   Synonymscomponentconstituentelementfactor

   Broaderpart

   Narrowerbe-all and end-allplot elementpoint
3. 3.

   food that is a component of a mixture in cooking

   “the recipe lists all the fixings for a salad”

   Synonymsfixings

   Broaderfoodstuff

   Narrowerflavorertomato pasteegg whiteegg yolkmalted milk

   Part ofdish

Other forms of ingredient

plural

ingredients·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about ingredient

What does ingredient mean?

ingredient means "a component of a mixture or compound". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in ingredient?

ingredient has 4 syllables: in-gre-di-ent. The stress falls on "gre". In IPA it is /ˌɪnˈɡɹidiənt/.

What is another word for ingredient?

Close synonyms include component, constituent, element, factor, fixings. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is ingredient a common word?

ingredient is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.