On Friday, December 17, 2021 at 10:30:06 AM UTC-5, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2021-12-17, wugi <
wu...@scrlt.com> wrote:
>
> > Why does English mess up oxygen and oxide?
> >
> > According to
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=oxide it was coined in
> > French in 1787 from ox(ygène) and (ac)ide, but in French it is oxyde and
> > according to my etymo-Larousse straight from gr. oxys, as from 1787.
> TLFi concurs that de Morveau coined it as _oxide_ in 1787 and
> supplies this quotation:
> Nous avons formé le mot oxide qui d'une part rappelle la substance
> avec laquelle le métal est uni, qui d'autre part annonce suffisamment
> que cette combinaison de l'oxigène ne doit pas être confondue
> avec la combinaison acide.
>
> The spelling _oxyde_ is first attested in 1801 in French.
>
https://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/oxyde
If you like "oxyde," you ought to also like "hydrode"!
> > Also in other languages you'll see d. Oxyd, nl. oxyde...
>
> German has been aligning the spelling of chemical nomenclature with
> international standards (i.e., English) in recent decades, although
> the old spellings continue to float around outside the scientific
> literature.
When did they discover that salts like the chlorides and iodides,
at least, were the same sort of thing? (Perhaps not sodium chloride,
because sodium metal came along a bit later, and perhaps not the
fluorides, because flourine bonds so tenaciously.),
Asimov's *Building Blocks of the Universe* was one of my favorites
--his first or one of his first science books (1957) -- apparently out
of print but used copies command surprisingly high prices.