Inflammabilis

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Capable of being easily ignited and set on fire
2. describing a substance that has a propensity to combust when exposed to heat or flames
3. indicating a material's readiness to catch fire under appropriate conditions

Etymology: "Inflammabilis" is Latin, built from "inflammare" ("to set on fire", from "in-" meaning "into" plus "flamma" meaning "flame") and the adjective ending "-bilis" meaning "able to be" or "capable of being". Its literal sense is "capable of being set on fire", which is exactly the meaning it carried in English for centuries. The surprise is in the English word that came from it. "Inflammable" entered English in the 1600s and was long the ordinary word for "easily set alight," so a safety label on a can of petrol once read as a plain description of what the contents would do. The trouble was that many people read the prefix "in-" as meaning "not," as in "invisible" or "inactive," and assumed "inflammable" meant "non-flammable." Accidents followed, and in the twentieth century safety campaigns and regulators pushed "flammable" as the clearer term. Today "flammable" is the standard word, while "inflammable" survives mainly as a listed variant, though it is still used in some older texts and figurative contexts.