Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Thermodynamics
/ˌθɜrmoʊdaɪˈnæmɪks/noun
The physics of heat, work, energy and their conversion into each other.
The Greek roots
θερμός
thermós
hot, warm
δύναμις
dýnamis
power, force
Literally: “heat power”
The story of the word
William Thomson wrote of a thermo-dynamic engine in 1849 and the noun grew out of the adjective. The field itself came out of Sadi Carnot's 1824 analysis of steam engines, written while heat was still widely thought to be a weightless fluid called caloric. Clausius supplied the second law and, in 1865, the word entropy, from ἐν and τροπή, a turning within, deliberately shaped to rhyme with energy. δύναμις also gives dynamite, named by Nobel in 1867, and dynasty, power held on to.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
dynamicdynamitedynastythermometer
In a sentence
Every perpetual motion machine ever patented breaks one of the two laws of thermodynamics.