You may recall that “nitrogen”, “hydrogen”, and “oxygen” have something in common: the suffix “-gen” means “begetter of” in Greek, and these three elements were named after what they “produce.” Hydrogen produces water (hydro) when burned, oxygen reacts with metal to form acidic oxides that have a distinctly sour taste (“oxy-“ in Greek means sharp or sour), and nitrogen “produces” nitre.
Nitre is interesting. Nowadays it means “postassium nitrate,” which is also called saltpeter. But originally “nitre” meant something completely different: sodium carbonate. That’s a mineral that occurs naturally and has nothing at all to do with nitrogen. The confusion might come from the alternative name of sodium carbonate: “natron.”
The confusion goes further than that, though. Natron is a compound of sodium, and sodium has been confusing chemistry students for generations because its chemical symbol is “Na.” This is not what you’d expect, assuming you were expecting it to be the more sensible “So.” The “Na,” as you’ve already guessed, stands for natron. The word “sodium”, by the way, was coined by Michael Faraday, who extracted the stuff from soda. But not the kind of soda that today means fizzy beverages. Fizzy beverages are “carbonated,” which at least makes some sense, because the fizz comes from carbon dioxide. But anyway, back to nitre. Or natron. Or whatever the subject might be at the moment. Oh, right, it’s actually “nitrogen.”
Ammonia is one of the most common compounds containing nitrogen. “Ammonia” got its name from “sal ammoniac,” the main ingredient of smelling salts. That ingredient came from a place — an area of Libya called Ammonia. “Sal Ammoniac” is “salt from Ammonia.” And ammonia gets its name from Ammon, who was one of the ancient Egyptian gods. Now, the substance we call ammonia was also once called “spirits of hartshorn.” This is because another way to produce it, without traveling all the way to northern Africa, was to distill it from animal hoofs. A hart is a kind of deer, and deer have hoofs (not to mention horns or antlers).
Ammonia is an alkali, and once the name “alkali” was settled, ammonia was also called “animal alkali” because of that second way of getting it. It wasn’t the only kind of alkali, of course, you could also ask your friendly neighborhood chemist for vegetable alkali (you’d get potash) or mineral alkali (and then you’d get — wait for it — soda). “Soda” probably originally meant what we’d now call sodium oxide, but the word “soda” is used pretty casually to mean a number of sodium compounds, from sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) to sodium carbonate (washing soda).
“Alkali,” as you would probably expect because you might have read it here at some point (and you remember all this ridiculous trivia, right? RIGHT?!?), is derived from Arabic. Nearly all English words that begin with “al-” are. It’s from the Arabic “al-kali” which means “the ashes.” Remember vegetable alkali — potash? Come on, it was only about thirty words back. Anyway, the word “potash” is literally “pot ash” — ashes from a pot. The element “potassium” got its name from potash, which contains plenty of it. And just to confuse generations of chemistry students a little bit more, potassium’s chemical symbol is not “P,” but “K.” The “K,” not obviously at all, comes from “kali”, the Arabic word for ashes, which English swiped to make “alkali.”
Luckily for anybody who enjoys completely chaotic word of the day trivia, here’s one more wacky tidbit to add to this whole mess. Ammon, the god — you know, the guy whose name inspired a place which was near some mine where you could get a kind of salt with a pungent smell that was named for the place and then used by a chemist who discovered a compound that he named for the salt that was named for the place that was named for the god? Anyway, people found something else around that area: fossils of a kind of ancient sea creature that had a curling shell that resembled the horns of a ram. Ammon, coincidentally, had a human body but a ram’s head, complete with curling horns. Anyway, when those fossils were found, they needed a name too, and what did they get called? “Ammonites.”
