Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Chirality
/kaɪˈralɪti/noun
The property of an object that cannot be superimposed on its mirror image, as with a left and right hand.
The Greek roots
χείρ
cheír
hand
Literally: “handedness”
Follow a root:χείρ6 words
The story of the word
Lord Kelvin gave the word its scientific sense in the 1890s, defining a chiral figure as one whose mirror image cannot be brought to coincide with itself. The point matters in pharmacy: two mirror-image forms of the same drug can behave completely differently in the body, as the thalidomide disaster made brutally clear. Life itself is chiral, since nearly all biological amino acids are left-handed and nobody knows why.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
chiropracticsurgerychiromancyenchiridion
In a sentence
The two molecules differ only in chirality, and only one of them works.
A knot has chirality if you cannot deform it into its mirror image.