Microchemistry

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The branch of chemistry that studies and analyzes substances present in only minute amounts, using specialized techniques suited to tiny samples
2. A field of chemical analysis concerned with working on and examining extremely small quantities of material by highly sensitive methods
3. Chemical study carried out on minute samples, where tiny amounts of matter are investigated with precise, specially designed apparatus

Etymology: Microchemistry is simply micro- attached to chemistry, and the surprise lies in the chemistry half. That word traces back through French "chimie" and Medieval Latin "alchemia" to Arabic "al-kīmiyāʾ", and behind that to Greek "khumeía", a term that originally meant something like the art of casting metals or fusing alloys. The alchemists' craft of transmuting base substances took its name from the same root, so the modern science and its medieval ancestor share one lineage. English adopted "chemistry" in the late Middle Ages in the form "chymistrie", and the word was later refashioned to match its French spelling. The prefix "micro-" comes from Greek "mīkrós", meaning "small". Scientists began using it freely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to name fields that worked at tiny scales, such as microbiology and microscopy. Attaching it to chemistry produced a compound describing chemical analysis carried out on very small quantities of material, rather than the traditional, larger-scale bench work.

Synonyms: microanalysis