Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Cyanide
/ˈsaɪənaɪd/noun
A salt or ion containing carbon triple-bonded to nitrogen, lethal in small doses.
The Greek roots
κύανος
kýanos
dark blue enamel
Literally: “the dark-blue substance”
Follow a root:κύανος5 words
The story of the word
The name records a colour, not a poison. The compound was first isolated from Prussian blue, the deep pigment an eighteenth-century Berlin colour-maker produced by accident, and chemists named the new radical after the blue it came out of. Homer's κύανος was a dark blue glass or enamel inlaid in armour. The same root gives cyanosis, the blue tinge of lips starved of oxygen, which is what cyanide poisoning prevents by locking the cells out of using it at all.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1820s
Same family
cyancyanosiscyanobacteriacyanotype
In a sentence
Gold mining still leaches ore with cyanide, which is why the tailings ponds are fenced.