Describing enzymes capable of breaking down starch and rendering it soluble, an older technical adjective for what modern enzymology calls amylolytic activity. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century texts applied it to the starch-digesting ferments of saliva, pancreatic juice, and malted grain before the individual amylases were purified and named. The term captures the essential transformation: insoluble starch granules, which hot water merely swells, become soluble dextrins and sugars under enzyme action. While the word has faded from current scientific writing in favor of precise enzyme names and EC numbers, it survives in historical literature and some dictionaries. Readers of old brewing and baking texts will meet it where modern writers would say starch-degrading or amylolytic, describing the same indispensable chemistry.