Alcohol

How to spell alcohol

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce alcohol

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alcohol mean?

1. nounA drink, such as beer, wine, or spirits, containing an intoxicating substance produced by fermentation.
2. nounAn organic chemical compound containing a hydroxyl group, used in fuels, solvents, and disinfectants.

Alcohol in a sentence

• The airline does not serve alcohol on early morning flights.

• The hand sanitiser relies on a high concentration of alcohol to kill germs.

• She gave up alcohol for the whole month of January.

• The lab technician cleaned the glass slide with pure alcohol.

Where does alcohol come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

This word travelled into English from Arabic, where al-kuhl named the very fine black powder of antimony that was ground up and used as eye make-up, what we still call kohl. Medieval Latin borrowed the term as alcohol and applied it to any impalpable powder produced by grinding or by refining, keeping the idea of something reduced to its purest essence. By the sixteenth century European writers were using it for the refined essence or 'spirit' obtained by distillation, and the phrase 'alcohol of wine' meant the pure spirit drawn off from wine. Over time the qualifying 'of wine' was dropped and alcohol came to mean the intoxicating spirit itself, and later the whole chemical family of such compounds. The spelling preserves that Arabic origin: the al- is literally the Arabic word for 'the', which is why the word never doubles its letters the way many English words do.

How the word is built

• al- (Arabic definite article: the)
• cohol (from kohl: fine powder)