Chemistry (etymology) - From Alchemy To Chemistry

From Alchemy To Chemistry

It was the mineralogist and humanist Georg Agricola who first dropped the Arabic definite article and began, in his Latin works from 1530 on, to write "chymia" and "chymista" instead of the earlier "alchymia" and "alchymista". As a humanist, Agricola was intent on purifying words and returning them to their classical roots. He had no intent to make a distinction between a rational and practical science of "chymia" and the occult "alchymia", for he used the first of these words to apply to both kinds of activities. The modern denotational distinction arose only in the early eighteenth century.

During the rest of the sixteenth century Agricola's new coinage slowly propagated. It seems to have been adopted in most of the vernacular European languages following Conrad Gessner's adoption of it in his extremely popular pseudonymous work, De remediis secretis: Liber physicus, medicus, et partim etiam chymicus (Zurich 1552). This work was frequently re-published in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the earliest known occurrences of forms of the French "chimie," the German "Chemie," the Italian "chimica," and the English "chemistry" are found in early translations.