Gasoline

How to spell gasoline

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce gasoline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gasoline mean?

1. nounA volatile, flammable liquid refined from petroleum and used as fuel for engines.

Gasoline in a sentence

• The pump showed that gasoline prices had climbed again over the weekend.

• He kept a spare can of gasoline in the garage for the lawnmower.

Where does gasoline come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Gasoline is a coined word from the middle of the nineteenth century, assembled rather than inherited, which is part of why its spelling feels arbitrary. The first element is 'gas', a word itself invented around 1650 by the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, who based it loosely on the Greek 'khaos' meaning 'empty space' or 'void'. To that was added '-ol', taken from the Latin 'oleum' meaning 'oil', and finally '-ine', a common suffix used in chemistry to name substances. The result described a refined, oil-derived fuel that gives off flammable vapour. One persistent and colourful claim is that the term grew out of 'Cazeline' or 'Gazeline', a branded lamp oil sold in Britain by John Cassell in the 1860s, though the plainer chemical reading is the more defensible one. The buried '-ol-' from 'oleum' is the spelling trap, since the ear hears a vague unstressed syllable rather than the 'oil' it actually encodes.

How the word is built

• gas (from 'gas', the volatile substance)
• -ol- (from Latin oleum: oil)
• -ine (chemical suffix)