Dioxide

How to spell dioxide

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dioxide

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dioxide mean?

1. nounA chemical compound containing two oxygen atoms combined with one other element.

Dioxide in a sentence

• Factories must monitor how much carbon dioxide they release each year.

• The sealed jar filled with carbon dioxide as the yeast fermented.

Where does dioxide come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern scientific compound, assembled in the nineteenth century from chemical building blocks rather than inherited from older speech. The prefix di- comes from the Greek dis, meaning 'twice' or 'two', and it signals that the compound contains two atoms of oxygen. The second part, oxide, was coined by French chemists from oxygen, itself built by Lavoisier from the Greek oxys, meaning 'sharp' or 'acid', plus genes, meaning 'forming', because oxygen was once thought to be the essential ingredient of all acids. The ending -ide became the standard chemical suffix for naming a simple binary compound, as in chloride and sulphide. So dioxide reads almost literally as 'two-oxygen compound', and remembering that the di- means 'two' is the simplest guard against dropping a letter when you spell it.

How the word is built

• di- (Greek: two)
• ox- (from oxygen)
• -ide (chemical suffix for a binary compound)