Dephlogisticate

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To remove or extract phlogiston, a substance once believed to be released during combustion ; to purify or rid a substance of inflammable principles ; to carry out a process thought to eliminate the hypothetical element responsible for burning
2. To take away the supposed combustible principle in matter according to outdated chemistry theory ; to cleanse or strip a substance from its flammable component ; to perform a procedure intended to dephlogisticate or render a material non-flammable
3. To eliminate the element understood in historical phlogiston theory as causing combustion ; to treat or alter a substance to remove its burning property ; to chemically or theoretically remove what was thought to be the fire-giving element from a sample

Etymology: "Dephlogisticate" is a chemistry term from the era when combustion was explained by a substance called phlogiston, supposedly a fire-like element that escaped from burning matter. To dephlogisticate something was to strip that imagined element out of it, and the word's meaning was built entirely on that now-discarded theory. The verb is formed from the prefix "de-", meaning "remove or reverse," added to "phlogisticate," which itself meant to charge a substance with phlogiston. The word reached English through French. It was modeled on the French "déphlogistiquer," which chemists used in the same sense, so English took up the French coinage rather than building the term from scratch. Its shape reflects the phlogiston theory's peak in the eighteenth century, when chemists debated how burning and metal-making worked.

Synonyms: purify, detoxify, cleanse

Antonyms: contaminate, pollute