imidazole - 11-4-2025 at 05:12
Where did the name ligroin come from from?
it's such a strange name, and the other common name is petroleum ether, and it's not an ether,
so I guess white spirits would be a name, but last I checked it wasn't white.
Heavy naphtha? last I checked it wasn't made of naphthalene!
Yeah, I know the origins for the other names, but I think there's quite a few strange and dated names for some hydrocarbon liquid.
chempyre235 - 11-4-2025 at 05:41
According to Merriam-Webster, the etymology is unknown. Collins dictionary suggests that the probable origin is a Greek word for 'clear.'
For some of the other names like 'petroleum ether' and 'naphtha,' IIRC those names existed before the systematic chemical names as we know them now.
[Edited on 4/11/2025 by chempyre235]
Keras - 11-4-2025 at 05:56
The Oxford dictionary also throws in the towel. Wikipedia has interesting notes, i.e. excerpts from old texts where the name appears as li-gro-in. It
says this is a US coinage, which suggests maybe li- (light?) gro (???) - in (as in amine suffixes?). Or light growing, as the fuel was mainly used in
lamps at that time?
bnull - 11-4-2025 at 09:01
These old-fashioned names date from the time where scientists knew almost nothing about the chemical structure of the substances. Composition, yes;
structure, no. There was no general naming rules, so lots of substances gained names ending in -ol(e), -in(e), -one, -ene, -ic, not to mention the
names that derivatives of the substances received afterwards (benzoin>benzine>benzene, for example). French, German, and Latin were the
scientific languages of the time, so many names ending in -in(e) were given by their speakers. The English language had been heavily influenced by
French in the Middle Ages, so English names ending in -in(e) come as no big surprise after all.
'Ether' means a volatile liquid (ether comes from aether, Greek for air). Hence, petroleum ether means a volatile substance that comes from petroleum.
Spirit and ether are just about the same thing, 'essence' or something like that. Ethanol was called 'spiritus vini', wine spirit, centuries before
gaining the usual name.
The non-white ligroin you saw had some coloring matter added to it (like Solvent Dye random-number). This is one way for governments to make sure that
the right taxes are collected and that no one uses the lower-taxed stuff in place of a higher-taxed one.
About naphtha and naphthalene, it is the other way around. The substance and name naphthalene both come from naphtha. Naphtha is the other name of
petroleum, of course, and I'm repeating the obvious.
Anyway. One possible origin for 'ligroin' or 'ligroine' is from the Greek lygros, 'thin'. Ligroin is a thinner fraction of petroleum. Twenty bucks
there is a paper buried somewhere in the Annals or Transactions of an American Philosophical or Scientific Society from the mid-1800s that tells of
how someone fractioned petroleum and studied the properties of the volatile fraction.
It is also possible that the etymology was given in an American chemistry book of the same period but, as far as old books go, my readings are mostly
on the British side.
DraconicAcid - 11-4-2025 at 15:55
I'd guess that it's "white naphtha" simply because it was colourless (rather than the dingy yellow of less-pure petroleum fractions), and people
prefer the one-syllable "white" to the three-syllable "colourless".
leau - 18-4-2025 at 04:05
From:
https://dictozo.com/w/ligroin
Ligroin is derived from the Latin word 'ligare' which means 'to bind'. In the context of chemistry, it refers to a bound
or distilled oil.
The end results from the effort applied 
bnull - 7-12-2025 at 04:01
The Oxford English Dictionary says that the name was first used in the Journal of the Chemical Society in the 1870s (1873, to be more precise). I have
no subscription to it and a simple search in that journal leads to a few articles that use different spellings of ligroin: ligroïn and ligröin. The
latter has a German feel to it, so it could well be a trade name that had turned generic. I'll post the links to the articles later.
Dictozo has no sources for those statements (or any other statement it contains) and is a learning tool, not a dictionary. What is a bound oil,
anyway?
Edit: An article for the Dinglers Polytechnisches Journal by a Prof. Schafhäutl, Über die neue ligroine oder petroleum gaslamp*, deals
with the then recently (1866) discovered ligroin. This is the oldest instance of ligroin in German chemical literature that I could find. It gives no
etymology but at least is a clue as to where (Germany) and when (before or in 1866) the origin of the name can be found.
Prof. Schafhäutl, Über die Neue Ligroine oder Petroleum Gaslamp, https://dingler.bbaw.de/articles/ar179116.html
*: On the New Ligroin or Lamp Oil, or something like that. My capitalization in German is a little
off.
[Edited on 7-12-2025 by bnull]