Vinyl

How to spell vinyl

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce vinyl

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vinyl mean?

1. nounA tough synthetic plastic used for flooring, upholstery and signs, or the records pressed from it.

Vinyl in a sentence

• The kitchen floor is covered in hard-wearing vinyl.

• He collects jazz albums on vinyl rather than streaming them.

Where does vinyl come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Vinyl is a chemist's coinage from the middle of the nineteenth century, assembled from the Latin word vinum, meaning 'wine', joined to the suffix -yl, which chemists use to label a particular group of atoms (that suffix itself traces back to the Greek hyle, meaning 'matter' or 'stuff'). The 'wine' connection sounds odd today, but it reflects the early chemistry of alcohol and ethylene: the radical was related to substances derived from the spirits of wine, so the wine name stuck. The term entered English around the 1860s as a strictly technical label and then spread into everyday speech in the twentieth century, first for the tough plastic polyvinyl chloride and later as the popular name for gramophone records pressed from that plastic. The spelling trap is that unstressed second syllable: it sounds like a weak '-uhl', yet it is written with a 'y' and a single 'l', giving vin-yl rather than the tempting 'vinal' or 'vinul'.

How the word is built

• vin- (from Latin vinum: wine)
• -yl (chemistry suffix marking a radical or chemical group)