1125: -ol Jan 7, 2018

Lots of chemicals and medical drugs end with the suffix '-ol'. Generally this follows guidelines for scientific nomenclature. The suffix refers to organic compounds that form alcohols and phenols. Arguably, this was influenced from some sort of back-formation [1] of words such as 'alcohol' [2], which has this ending (in this case though not a suffix) but is many centuries old and entered English as a non-scientific word. '-ol' is nevertheless said to be derived from the Latin word for 'oil'. However, given that so many words end in this '-ol' (sometimes found as '-ole') anything given this suffix could sound more scientific. People trust things that sound like they are scientific to be so, which is why there are often science-resembling words made up for the genre of science-fiction, but this also happens with drugs like Tylenol® or the renamed 'paracetamol' in Commonwealth countries which don't have the '-ol' in its standard nomenclature. Instead, the name scientifically is 'acetaminophen', and while there are certainly marketed drugs with the '-phen' ending as well, people decided to rebrand in this case. You can support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.


[1] https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2017/08/993-indifferent-and-different-aug-28.html

[2] https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2017/02/796-alcohol-and-arabic-words-in-spanish.html