Succinyl

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A chemical radical derived from succinic acid by removing its hydroxyl groups, commonly found in biochemical compounds and reactions
2. The acyl group obtained from succinic acid, a four-carbon dicarboxylic acid, used in organic chemistry to name derivatives
3. A univalent organic group formed from succinic acid, appearing in names of compounds such as succinyl chloride and succinyl-CoA

Etymology: Succinyl is a chemistry coinage, and its history is really the history of two older words stitched together. The first half, "succinic," comes from Latin "sūcinum," meaning amber, from "sūcus," juice or sap. Amber was thought to be hardened tree sap, and the acid was first obtained by distilling amber, which is why the name points back to it. Succinic acid thus carries the ancient idea of resin in its name, even though the compound itself has nothing to do with the material it was first made from. The second half, "-yl," is a much younger piece. It comes from Ancient Greek "hūlē," meaning wood or matter, which French chemists adopted in the early 1800s as a label for the basic group of atoms that remains unchanged through a reaction, much as a wooden frame stays put while the building around it changes. English took the suffix in that sense. "Succinyl" is simply succinic plus -yl, naming the acyl group derived from succinic acid, and it was built by chemists rather than inherited from speech.