Acrylic

How to spell acrylic

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce acrylic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acrylic mean?

1. adjectiveMade of or relating to a synthetic resin, paint, or fibre derived from acrylic acid.
2. nounA synthetic material, paint, or fibre made from acrylic acid, or a painting made using such paint.

Acrylic in a sentence

• adjective

  The artist preferred acrylic paint because it dries quickly.

• noun

  The framed acrylic hung in the gallery beside two watercolours.

• adjective

  She knitted the scarf from a soft acrylic yarn rather than wool.

• noun

  The kitchen worktop was a durable cream acrylic.

Where does acrylic come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes out of nineteenth-century chemistry rather than everyday speech. It traces back to acrolein, a sharp-smelling liquid whose name was coined in the 1840s from the Latin acer, meaning 'sharp' or 'pungent' (the same root that gives us 'acrid'), combined with a fragment of the Latin olere, 'to smell'. Chemists then named acrylic acid after acrolein, attaching the chemical suffix -yl (used for radicals) and the adjective ending -ic. From the mid-1800s onward the adjective described compounds derived from that acid, and in the twentieth century it spread to the popular plastics, paints, and synthetic fibres made from acrylic resins. The spelling trap lives in the middle: a single c, then a y where many writers instinctively want an i, all stemming from that old 'sharp smell' root.

How the word is built

• acr- (from acrolein, ultimately Latin acer: sharp, pungent)
• -yl (chemical-radical suffix)
• -ic (adjective suffix)