Ethanes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Colorless odorless flammable gaseous hydrocarbons consisting of two carbon atoms bonded together and saturated with hydrogen
2. Simple saturated hydrocarbons composed of a two-carbon chain with hydrogen atoms filling all remaining bonds
3. Gaseous organic compounds made of two linked carbon atoms with all remaining valencies occupied by hydrogen atoms

Etymology: Ethanes is simply the plural of ethane, a flammable gas, so the history below is really the history of ethane. The name is a deliberate chemical coinage rather than an old word: "eth-" was taken from "ethyl," the name chemists gave to the radical C2H5 in the 1830s, and "-ane" is the suffix used for saturated hydrocarbons, borrowed from the Latin "-anus" through the pattern of "methane." Ethyl itself came from German chemistry, built on "ether," which in turn traces back to the Greek "aithēr," meaning the bright, clear upper air. Before it named a gas, "ether" meant the sky itself. Greek writers imagined "aithēr" as the pure substance filling the heavens above the air, and later Latin "aether" kept that lofty sense. Chemists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries borrowed the name for the volatile liquid they discovered, so a word for the heavens ended up describing a laboratory solvent.