Albuterol

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A drug that relaxes the airway muscles and opens the breathing passages, commonly inhaled to relieve asthma and wheezing
2. An inhaled medicine used to ease breathlessness by widening the bronchial tubes during asthma attacks or other lung conditions
3. A prescription bronchodilating agent that helps the lungs move air more freely, often taken through a handheld inhaler to treat asthma

Etymology: Albuterol is a modern pharmaceutical coinage, built from fragments of older chemical names rather than from any ancient language. Its first part, "sal", comes from "salicylic acid", the compound related to aspirin, from which the drug's chemical scaffold was derived. The second part, "-buterol", is a naming element in which "butyl" and "tert-butyl" appear, and those in turn come from "butyric acid", the compound that gives butter its tang. That link is the surprising one: the word's ending traces back to the Greek "boutūros", meaning "butter", literally "cow cheese", formed from "boûs" (cow) and "tūrós" (cheese). The chain of naming runs through the word "arterenol", a name for a related compound, which led to the suffix "-terol" and then to "-buterol", a family label for drugs of this type. Albuterol is the name given to the drug that combines the "sal" element with that suffix. It is used as a bronchodilator, a substance that relaxes the airways in the lungs.

Synonyms: salbutamol