Hydrogen

How to spell hydrogen

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hydrogen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hydrogen mean?

1. nounThe lightest chemical element, a colourless flammable gas, used as a fuel and in industry.

Hydrogen in a sentence

• The new bus fleet runs on hydrogen rather than diesel.

• Water forms when hydrogen combines with oxygen.

Where does hydrogen come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Hydrogen is a coined scientific term built from two Greek elements: hydor, meaning 'water', and the suffix -genes, meaning 'producing' or 'giving rise to'. The name was created in French as hydrogene by the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and his colleagues in the 1780s, because burning the gas produces water as its only product. English adopted it as 'hydrogen' very soon afterwards, near the end of the eighteenth century. The same hydor root sits inside familiar words such as 'hydrate', 'hydraulic', and 'dehydrate', while the -gen ending recurs in 'oxygen' and 'nitrogen', its sibling gases named in the same burst of new chemistry. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle syllable, where the schwa makes the second vowel sound like an 'uh' even though it is written with an 'o' in 'hydro'.

How the word is built

• hydro- (from Greek hydor: water)
• -gen (from Greek -genes: producing, born of)