Dimethylanilines

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Organic chemical compounds derived from aniline in which two methyl groups have replaced hydrogen atoms on the nitrogen or ring
2. Aromatic amine compounds made by attaching two methyl groups to the aniline molecule, used in dye and resin manufacture
3. Nitrogen-containing aromatic chemicals formed when a pair of methyl groups is added to aniline, important intermediates in industrial chemistry

Etymology: Dimethylaniline is a chemical compound, and its name is a stack of older chemical building blocks. Its core, aniline, comes from the Portuguese "anil" (indigo dye), which in turn came through Arabic "nīl" from Sanskrit "nīla", meaning dark blue. The name traces back to indigo, a plant whose blue dye the Portuguese traded from the East, and the chemical was named for its relationship to that colour-producing substance. Aniline itself entered the chemical vocabulary as German "Anilin" in the nineteenth century. The rest of the word describes the molecule's structure. "Methyl" is a shortened form of German "Methyl", built from Greek "méthu" (wine) and "hūlē" (wood or matter), a coinage from the era when chemists named radicals from their sources. The prefix "di-", from Greek "dís" meaning "twice", indicates that two methyl groups are attached to the aniline core. Plural "dimethylanilines" simply denotes more than one such compound. Its parts were assembled in English, not inherited, so the word reflects nineteenth-century chemical naming rather than any ancient usage.