Decahydronaphthalene

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A colorless, oily liquid hydrocarbon made by fully hydrogenating naphthalene, used as an industrial solvent
2. An oily, colorless chemical compound consisting of a fully saturated two-ring hydrocarbon, commonly employed as a solvent in industry
3. A saturated bicyclic hydrocarbon, obtained from naphthalene by hydrogenation, that is colorless and oily and serves as a industrial solvent

Etymology: Decahydronaphthalene is a chemical coinage, built by stacking prefixes onto an older name. Its oldest piece is "náphtha," an ancient Greek word for a flammable, oily substance, probably borrowed from Old Persian "naftah," which is related to the modern word for petroleum. Latin later took "naphtha," and English adopted it, and French and English chemists then shaped it into "naphthalene," the name for a crystalline hydrocarbon distilled from coal tar, with the ending "-ene" marking it as a hydrocarbon of that family. The prefix "hydro-" comes from the Greek "hŭdro-," meaning water, and in chemistry it signals that hydrogen atoms have been added to a compound. "Deca-" comes from the Greek "dékă," meaning ten, and here indicates ten added hydrogen atoms. Together they describe a fully saturated form of naphthalene, the ring compound from which the name is built. The whole word is therefore a systematic description: ten, hydrogen, and naphthalene, assembled in the way chemists name compounds by their structure rather than by a traditional label.

Synonyms: decalin