Decanes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of alkane hydrocarbon characterized by a chain of ten carbon atoms
2. A class of organic compounds that are part of a larger family of saturated hydrocarbons
3. Compounds belonging to the category of hydrocarbons known for their straight or branched chains containing ten carbon atoms

Etymology: Decane belongs to a family of chemical names built from Greek number words, and its name is essentially a label for "ten" with a chemical suffix attached. The Greek "dékа" meant ten, and the Greek word "dekás" meant a group of ten, which passed into Late Latin as "decas" and then into French and English as the prefix "deca-", the same element that appears in "decade" and "decathlon." English took the "dec-" stem and joined it to the "-ane" ending, the standard marker of saturated hydrocarbons, so that "decane" simply means a ten-carbon member of the alkane series. The "-ane" ending has its own roots in Latin. It descends from the Latin suffix "-ānus" and the Proto-Italic "-ānos," and chemists adopted it as a systematic tag for the saturated hydrocarbons. The result is a name that reads like a plain count of carbon atoms, which is exactly what it was designed to do.