Dictionary Home » Dictionary Definitions » alcohol

alcohol

Listen See in Thesaurus See in a sentence

Alcohol is a liquor that contains ethanol and has the potential to intoxicate drinkers and it can be burned as fuel. (noun)

Whiskey, vodka, rum and gin are each an example of alcohol.

See alcohol in Webster's New World College Dictionary

noun

a colorless, volatile, pungent liquid, CHOH: it can be burned as fuel (10-15% of gasohol), is used in industry and medicine, and is the intoxicating element of whiskey, wine, beer, and other fermented or distilled liquors: classed as a depressant drug
also called ethyl alcohol
any intoxicating liquor with this liquid in it
the drinking of such liquors: alcohol was his downfall
a class of organic compounds, including ethyl or methyl (wood) alcohol, that contain one or more hydroxyl groups (OH) and form esters in reactions with acids

See alcohol in American Heritage Dictionary 4

(ălˈkə-hôlˌ, -hŏlˌ)

noun

A colorless volatile flammable liquid, C₂H₅OH, synthesized or obtained by fermentation of sugars and starches and widely used, either pure or denatured, as a solvent and in drugs, cleaning solutions, explosives, and intoxicating beverages. Also called ethanol, ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol.
Intoxicating liquor containing alcohol.
Any of a series of hydroxyl compounds, the simplest of which are derived from saturated hydrocarbons, have the general formula C_nH_2n+1OH, and include ethanol and methanol.

Word History: The al- in alcohol may alert some readers to the fact that this is a word of Arabic descent, as is the case with algebra and alkali, al- being the Arabic definite article corresponding to the in English. The origin of -cohol is less obvious, however. Its Arabic ancestor was kuḥl, a fine powder most often made from antimony and used by women to darken their eyelids; in fact, kuḥl has given us the word kohl for such a preparation. Arabic chemists came to use al-kuḥl to mean “any fine powder produced in a number of ways, including the process of heating a substance to a gaseous state and then recooling it.” The English word alcohol, derived through Medieval Latin from Arabic, is first recorded in 1543 in this sense. Arabic chemists also used al-kuḥl to refer to other substances such as essences that were obtained by distillation, a sense first found for English alcohol in 1672. One of these distilled essences, known as “alcohol of wine,” is the constituent of fermented liquors that causes intoxication. This essence took over the term alcohol for itself, whence it has come to refer to the liquor that contains this essence as well as to a class of chemical compounds such as methanol.

See alcohol in Ologies

Alcohol