Caffeine

How to spell caffeine

8 letters · 2 syllables

The most common mistake is caffiene. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

caffiene caffeine

What people typed instead

• caffiene3 people

How to pronounce caffeine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does caffeine mean?

1. nounA natural stimulant found in coffee, tea, and cola that increases alertness.

Caffeine in a sentence

• She avoids caffeine after lunch so she can sleep properly.

• The energy drink contains more caffeine than a double espresso.

Where does caffeine come from?

Language of origin: French

Caffeine takes its name straight from coffee, the drink whose stimulating alkaloid it is. The English word came from the German Kaffein, which the chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge coined in the 1820s after he first isolated the substance; he built it on Kaffee, the German word for coffee. That word traces back through French cafe and Italian caffe to the Arabic qahwa, which originally referred to a beverage and may once have meant something closer to wine. The ending -ine is the standard suffix used to name alkaloids and other chemical bases, the same one seen in nicotine and morphine. English adopted the term in the mid 1800s as the compound became widely studied. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the double f inherited from coffee, followed by an -ei- sequence that defies the usual 'i before e' habit because here it simply spells a long ee sound.

How the word is built

• caffe- (from coffee)
• -ine (chemical suffix naming an alkaloid)