Exploring the origins of our chemical terms
A chemical by any other name would smell as sweet
Recently, I’ve noticed that I use a plethora of chemical words without even thinking about them. My parents gently remind me of this when they ask me what I’m researching or reading and have to tell me every five minutes to ‘speak in English, not in chemistry’. It’s true that chemistry has its own language, with many people having noted the resemblance of chemistry to the pictorial nature of Mandarin, with curly arrows, mechanisms and balanced equations. But where do the chemical words that we use come from?