Stomach is the muscular, stretchy organ inside your body where food goes after you swallow it. Located beneath your ribs in the upper part of your abdomen, your stomach works like a churning machine that mashes up food and mixes it with powerful digestive juices that help break it down. When you eat a sandwich, it travels down your esophagus and lands in your stomach, where it gets squeezed and dissolved into a thick liquid before moving on to your intestines.

The stomach can expand to hold a large meal and then shrink back down when empty. Those gurgling sounds you sometimes hear are your stomach muscles at work. When you say your stomach hurts, you might actually mean your whole belly area, but the stomach itself is just one organ doing one specific job in the digestion process.

People also use stomach as a verb to mean tolerate or handle something difficult. If you can't stomach scary movies, you find them too disturbing to watch. Having the stomach for something means you have the courage to deal with it, like having the stomach to stand up for a friend who's being teased, even when it feels uncomfortable.