Ethanol

How to spell ethanol

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ethanol

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ethanol mean?

1. nounThe colourless, flammable alcohol found in alcoholic drinks and used as a solvent and fuel additive.

Ethanol in a sentence

• The laboratory stored ethanol in a sealed, fireproof cabinet.

• Much of the petrol sold locally is blended with ethanol to reduce emissions.

Where does ethanol come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Ethanol is a modern scientific coinage assembled from chemical naming parts rather than borrowed whole from any single ancient language. Its first element comes from 'ethyl', a name created by the German chemist Justus von Liebig in the 1830s by combining 'ether' with the Greek word 'hyle', meaning 'matter' or 'stuff'. The middle '-an-' ties it to 'ethane', signalling a saturated two-carbon chain, and the closing '-ol' is the systematic suffix that chemists attach to alcohols, ultimately echoing the word 'alcohol' itself (which entered European languages from the Arabic al-kuhl). The whole word came together in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as chemists standardised names, replacing older phrases such as 'ethyl alcohol'. For spelling, it helps to remember the 'th' of 'ether' and 'ethane' sits in the middle, and that the ending is the alcohol marker '-ol', not '-ole'.

How the word is built

• eth- (from ethyl, the C2H5 group)
• -an- (denoting a saturated carbon chain, as in ethane)
• -ol (chemical suffix marking an alcohol)