Gas

How to spell gas

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gas

What does gas mean?

1. nounA substance in the airy state, neither solid nor liquid, that expands to fill its container.
2. nounA clipped form of gasoline, the liquid fuel used in cars, common in North American usage.

Gas in a sentence

• Helium is a light gas used to fill balloons.

• We stopped to fill the tank with gas before the long drive.

• The engineers checked the pipes for any gas leak before lighting the boiler.

• The price of gas rose sharply over the summer holidays.

Where does gas come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word was coined around 1648 by the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, who needed a term for the airy, formless substances he was studying. He built it from the Greek khaos, meaning 'empty space' or 'chaos', the yawning void of the unformed universe, and respelled it to suit Dutch pronunciation, which is why such a short word has so unusual a look. For a long time it was a technical term used only by chemists describing any substance in the airy state, neither solid nor liquid. From the nineteenth century the meaning broadened to coal gas used for lighting and heating, and in American usage it became a clipped form of gasoline, the liquid fuel. Despite its strange birth the spelling is mercifully plain, three letters with no silent traps, which is why it is one of the easiest words in English to write.

How the word is built

• gas (a coined root, modelled on Greek khaos meaning empty space or chaos)