Alchemy

How to spell alchemy

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce alchemy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alchemy mean?

1. nounThe medieval forerunner of chemistry, devoted to turning base metals into gold and to seeking an elixir of life.
2. nounA seemingly magical or mysterious process that turns ordinary things into something far more valuable.

Alchemy in a sentence

• The museum exhibit explained how alchemy shaped early ideas about matter.

• The chef described the alchemy of turning cheap cuts into a memorable meal.

• Medieval scholars practised alchemy in the hope of producing gold from lead.

• There is a certain alchemy in how a good editor reshapes a clumsy draft.

Where does alchemy come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Alchemy reaches English through a long chain of borrowings that begins in the Arabic word al-kīmiyā, in which al- is simply the definite article 'the' and kīmiyā names the secretive art of transmuting metals. Arabic scholars had themselves taken the second element from the Greek khēmeia, a term for the working and pouring of metals that some trace to khēma 'a casting' and others link, more speculatively, to Khēmia, an old name for Egypt and its dark fertile soil. Medieval Latin reshaped the Arabic phrase as alchimia or alchemia, and from there Old French passed it to English in the 1300s, where it described the quest to turn lead into gold and to find an elixir of life. The clinging Arabic article al- is the reason the word keeps that initial 'al-', exactly as in algebra and alcohol. When the mystical trappings fell away in the 1600s, the surviving practical core was simply renamed 'chemistry', so alchemy and chemistry are quite literally the same word with and without its borrowed 'the'.

How the word is built

• al- (Arabic definite article 'the')
• chem (root shared with 'chemistry', from Greek khēmeia 'the art of transmuting metals')
• -y (noun-forming suffix)