Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Arsenic
/ˈɑːrsnɪk/noun
A brittle grey semi-metal, number 33 in the periodic table, notorious as a poison.
The Greek roots
ἀρσενικόν
arsenikón
yellow orpiment
ἄρσην
ársēn
male, potent
Literally: “the male, potent one”
The story of the word
Greek speakers heard ἄρσην, male, in the name of the yellow mineral orpiment, which suited an alchemy that graded substances by potency. The word almost certainly came from elsewhere: Old Iranian zarnīk, golden, passing through Syriac and being reshaped into something a Greek ear could parse. Arsenic itself was not isolated as an element until the thirteenth century at the earliest, long after the name was fixed to the ore.
- How it travelled
- Old Iranian → Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
arsenidearsenatearsine
In a sentence
Groundwater arsenic still affects tens of millions of wells across the Ganges delta.