Azodicarboxylate

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A chemical salt or ester derived from azodicarboxylic acid, containing the characteristic nitrogen-to-nitrogen double bond linking two carboxylate groups
2. An organic compound formed from azodicarboxylic acid, widely used as a reagent in synthesis such as the Mitsunobu reaction for forming bonds
3. A diester or salt of the azo dicarboxylic acid, typically employed in laboratory chemistry as an oxidizing agent during organic transformations

Etymology: Azodicarboxylate is a chemist's compound name built from two pieces, "azo-" and "dicarboxylate," and its history is simply that of those parts. The "azo-" element comes from "azote," the French name for nitrogen coined in the 1780s by Lavoisier and colleagues, which means "without life," since nitrogen does not support breathing or burning. Chemists used "azo-" to mark compounds containing a pair of nitrogen atoms joined by a double bond, and "azodicarboxylate" therefore names a molecule with an N=N core flanked by two carboxylate groups. The second part, "dicarboxylate," is a systematic coinage that tells the chemist there are two carboxylate groups, the anionic form of carboxylic acid, which is the source of the "di-" prefix meaning two. The whole name follows the convention of nomenclature that organic chemists developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it was not used in antiquity and carries no older meaning. Its value lies in describing structure precisely rather than in any colourful story.