sugar

Any of numerous sweet, colourless organic compounds that dissolve readily in water and occur in the sap of seed plants and the milk of mammals. Sugars (whose names end in ) are the simplest carbohydrates. The most common is sucrose, a disaccharide; there are numerous others, including glucose and fructose (both monosaccharides); invert sugar (a 50:50 mixture of glucose and fructose produced by enzyme action on sucrose); and maltose (produced in the malting of barley) and lactose (both disaccharides). Commercial production of sugars is almost entirely for food.

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