Amines

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Chemical compounds that contain nitrogen and include one or more amino groups, functioning as building blocks in biological processes
2. Substances derived from ammonia with varying organic groups substituting hydrogen, essential in numerous biochemical reactions
3. Compounds formed by replacing one or more hydrogen atoms in ammonia with organic groups, containing nitrogen atoms

Etymology: Ammonia, the pungent gas that gives smelling salts their bite, is itself named after a desert god. The ancient Egyptians worshipped Amun, and the Greeks identified him with Zeus and called him Ammon. The Romans knew a salt-bearing resin associated with his temple as "ammoniacum," and "sal ammoniacus" came to mean the salt made from the soot of burnt camel dung near his shrine in Libya. Chemists later applied the name to the gas itself. "Amine" follows the same pattern as many chemical coinages: "ammonia" plus the suffix "-ine," which English took from Latin "-inus" through Old French and which chemists used to mark substances related to a parent compound. An amine is therefore ammonia with one or more hydrogen atoms swapped for organic groups. The plural "amines" simply refers to the whole family of such compounds.

Synonyms: amino compounds