Chemistry

How to spell chemistry

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce chemistry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chemistry mean?

1. nounThe branch of science concerned with the substances that make up matter and how they react and combine.
2. nounA natural rapport or instinctive understanding between people.

Chemistry in a sentence

• She studied chemistry at university before becoming a pharmacist.

• The two presenters had an easy chemistry that the audience loved.

• The lab technician explained the chemistry behind the reaction.

• The new colleagues felt an immediate chemistry during the project.

Where does chemistry come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Chemistry grew out of the older word alchemy, which English took through Old French and Latin from the Arabic al-kimiya, where al was simply the article 'the' and kimiya named the secretive art of transforming metals. The Arabic term itself probably reaches back to a Greek word, khemeia, meaning the art of melting or alloying metals, though some link it to Khem, an old name for Egypt, the land where the craft was thought to flourish. By the 1600s English speakers had trimmed the Arabic article and started calling a practitioner a 'chemist', then formed the field name 'chemistry' on that base with the suffix used in words like 'dentistry'. As the discipline shed its mystical roots and became an experimental science, the spelling settled on the Greek-flavoured 'ch', which is why the word begins with a hard 'k' sound but is written with c-h. That mismatch between sound and spelling, plus the unstressed middle vowel, is the main thing that trips writers up.

How the word is built

• chem- (from chemist, ultimately alchemy)
• -istry (noun-forming suffix, from -ist
• -ry)