Protyles

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Hypothetical original matter from which all chemical elements were supposedly built, as proposed by early nineteenth century chemists
2. Imagined primordial substances thought to be the basic building material from which every chemical element originally formed
3. Theoretical base materials once believed to be the single common origin of all the chemical elements found in nature

Etymology: "Protyles" is the plural of "protyle," so it names more than one such substance. A protyle is a hypothetical primordial matter from which all the chemical elements were thought to be built. The word combines "proto-," meaning "first," with the Ancient Greek "hūlē," which meant "timber" or, more broadly, "material." The Greek word's sense of raw wood as a building material made it a natural model for a stuff that lies beneath everything else. The idea behind the term came from William Prout, an English chemist who, in the 1810s, noticed that the atomic weights of many elements were close to whole-number multiples of hydrogen's. He suggested hydrogen might be the basic building block of matter. The notion of a single underlying substance was then given the name "protyle" in the late nineteenth century, when chemists were still debating whether the elements were truly indivisible.