Ethane
/ˈɛθeɪn/noun
A colourless gas of two carbons and six hydrogens, the second member of the alkane series.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of the blazing upper air”
The story of the word
Ether comes first. Αἰθήρ was the bright upper air the gods breathed, from αἴθειν, to burn, and eighteenth-century chemists gave the name to a volatile liquid whose vapour behaved like shining nothing. Liebig cut ethyl out of ether in 1834, and when Hofmann laid out the systematic hydrocarbon endings in the 1860s ethane took its place in the line after methane. A gas of two carbons is therefore named, at four removes, after the sky.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Ethane is stripped out of natural gas and cracked to make ethylene.
Lakes of liquid ethane and methane sit on the surface of Titan.