Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Gas
/ɡæs/noun
A substance in the state that expands to fill whatever contains it.
The Greek roots
χάος
cháos
gaping void, chasm
Literally: “chaos, the void”
Follow a root:χάος2 words
The story of the word
Jan Baptist van Helmont invented the word around 1640 and said outright what he was doing: he wanted chaos, cháos, spoken the Flemish way, for the wild spirit that comes off burning charcoal and refuses to stay in a jar. In Greek cháos was not disorder but the gaping emptiness before the world took shape; the modern sense of chaos came much later. Very few words in any language can be dated to a single sentence by a single author, and this is one of them.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Dutch coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1650s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
chaoschaoticgaseous
In a sentence
Turn the gas off at the mains before you touch anything.
Helium is the one gas that will not freeze solid at ordinary pressure.