Methyl

How to spell methyl

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce methyl

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does methyl mean?

1. nounA chemical group derived from methane, consisting of one carbon atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms (CH3), found in many organic compounds.

Methyl in a sentence

• The chemist labelled the methyl group on the structural diagram before the lecture.

• Industrial methyl alcohol is toxic and must never be confused with drinking spirits.

Where does methyl come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a chemistry word with a surprisingly poetic ancestry. It traces back to the French methylene, coined in 1834 by the chemists Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Eugene Peligot, who built it from the Greek methy, meaning 'wine', and hyle, meaning 'wood' or 'material'. The combined sense was something like 'spirit of wood', because the substance they were studying came from the dry distillation of wood and behaved like an alcohol. From methylene, chemists soon shortened off the part denoting the CH3 group and called it the methyl radical. The word entered English in the mid-1800s as the science of organic chemistry was taking shape, and the spelling trap lives in that middle 'y', a remnant of the Greek hyle that English writers tend to replace with an 'i'.

How the word is built

• meth- (from Greek methy: wine)
• -yl (chemical suffix from Greek hyle: wood, matter, used for a radical group)