Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Aerosol
/ˈɛərəsɒl/noun
A suspension of fine particles or droplets in a gas, or the pressurised can that produces one.
The Greek roots
ἀήρ
aḗr
air, mist
Literally: “air solution”
Follow a root:ἀήρ15 words
The story of the word
Half Greek, half laboratory shorthand. The coinage is generally credited to Frederick Donnan around 1919, built on the model of hydrosol, a colloid suspended in water, with the sol clipped from solution. The spray can arrived by a separate road, patented by the Norwegian engineer Erik Rotheim in 1927, and only later took the chemist's word as its brand name.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1919
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
aerialaerobicaerodynamicsaeronautics
In a sentence
Sulphate aerosol from the eruption cooled the whole northern hemisphere for a year.
He shook the aerosol and painted over the tag.