Inflammabilities

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The property of being easily ignited or capable of burning rapidly
2. The quality of substances that can readily catch fire and sustain combustion
3. A characteristic that indicates the readiness of materials to ignite and propagate flames

Etymology: "Inflammabilities" is simply the plural of "inflammability," the noun for the quality of catching fire easily. Because the root word is what carries the history, the plural adds nothing new of its own: it names several such qualities or degrees of them, as when a chemist compares the flammabilities of different fuels. The root "inflammable" comes from Latin "inflammare," meaning "to set on fire," built from the prefix "in-" and "flammare," "to flame," which itself derives from "flamma," flame. English took the adjective and later the noun from this stem, and the "in-" here is the intensifying or "into" prefix rather than the negating one. That creates a small trap: "inflammable" and "flammable" mean the same thing, yet "in-" looks like a negative, which led many people to assume "inflammable" meant "not able to burn." Safety labelling eventually favoured "flammable" for this reason.

Synonyms: flammability, combustibility