nicotine
NIK-uh-teen · noun
FrenchEnglish
Origin
Nicotine comes from French nicotine, formed from the surname Nicot plus the ending -ine. It honors Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal who sent tobacco seeds back to France in 1561.
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Journey
The word moved from being a personal name attached to a plant to the name of the chemical compound found in that plant, as it was borrowed into English from French.
Related words
The -ine ending here traces back through French -in to Latin -īnus, a suffix pattern used to form many chemical and descriptive terms.
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