Dimethylaniline

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A colorless, oily aromatic amine made from aniline and used as an intermediate in the production of dyes and other chemicals
2. An oily, colorless organic compound in which two methyl groups are attached to the nitrogen of aniline, used widely in making dyestuffs
3. A tertiary aromatic amine with a pungent odor, employed as a chemical intermediate especially in the manufacture of coloring agents

Etymology: Dimethylaniline is a compound built from three older chemical names stacked together, and its story runs through two very different sources: Greek wine and Persian-Arabic indigo. The "methyl" part comes from Ancient Greek "méthu", meaning wine, joined to "hūlē", meaning wood or matter, because chemists first isolated methyl alcohol from wood distillation and named the group after it. The "aniline" part is older and more exotic. It descends from Sanskrit "nīla", "dark blue", which passed through Middle Persian and Arabic "nīl" (the indigo plant) before reaching Portuguese as "anil", a word for indigo dye. German chemists then used it for the substance derived from indigo, and English adopted it as "aniline". The prefix "di-" is simply the Greek "dis" form meaning "two", recording that this compound carries two methyl groups attached to the nitrogen of aniline. So a chemical name built from wine, wood, and an Indian blue dye is, at its core, a precise description of molecular structure. The word is a systematic coinage of the nineteenth century, when chemists began naming compounds by their parts.

Synonyms: N,N-dimethylaniline