Aminobenzoyl

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A chemical group derived from benzoic acid that carries an amino substituent, used as a building block in organic and pharmaceutical chemistry
2. An organic radical formed from aminobenzoic acid by removal of the hydroxyl group, containing both a benzene ring and an amino group
3. The acyl radical of an aminated benzoic acid, a structural unit found in many dyes, drugs and other synthetic compounds

Etymology: Aminobenzoyl is a chemist's compound, built by stacking older chemical names together rather than coined from a single root. Its oldest piece is "amino-", which goes back to "ammonia." That name traces to the Egyptian god Amun, whose Greek form was "Ammon" and whose Latin form was "Ammon," used for a salt sold near his temple in Libya that gave off ammonia when heated. English later gave the family of nitrogen compounds the "amine" suffix, and "amino-" is the prefix that marks an amine group attached to a larger molecule. The "benzoyl" half takes a very different route. Its ancestor is "benzoin," the resin of a Southeast Asian tree, which Arabic traders knew as "lubān jāwiyy," meaning "frankincense of Java," even though the trade came from Sumatra and surrounding islands. Through Catalan and French, the name reached English as "benzoin" in the 1600s, and chemists later built "benzoic" and then "benzoyl," the acyl group of benzoic acid, from it. Joined together, the two pieces describe a benzoyl group carrying an amino group, a name that records a chain running from an Egyptian god through Arabic spice trade to nineteenth-century laboratory naming.