Pyrones

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Organic chemical compounds whose six-membered ring contains an oxygen atom and a carbonyl group, found in many natural products
2. Heterocyclic compounds built on a ring of five carbon atoms and one oxygen atom, with a ketone group and double bonds
3. A family of oxygen-containing ring compounds that serve as building blocks for many plant pigments and flavour molecules

Etymology: "Pyrones" is the plural of "pyrone", a chemical term for a family of organic compounds built on a six-membered ring of carbon and oxygen atoms. Its name is a compound: "pyro-", from Ancient Greek "pûr", meaning fire, joined to the suffix "-one", which chemists use to mark a ketone, a molecule containing a carbonyl group. The "pyro-" element signals heat, since chemists often named compounds after substances obtained by heating or distilling other materials. The name therefore records a laboratory origin rather than a natural source, pointing to a compound made by the action of heat on an organic material. Because the word is a modern technical coinage, it is built from classical Greek parts rather than being inherited from ancient usage. The ancient Greeks had no notion of pyrones; they knew only the word "pûr" for fire, which chemists borrowed through Latin "pyr" to build their new vocabulary.