What’s in a Name?

What’s in a name?  What is the history of the word “electricity”?

We get “electricity’” from the Latin word “electricus”.  Literally translated, it means “of amber” or “like amber” and from the Greek word “ηλεκτρικός”.  

But why amber?

Why are electricity and amber so connected?   Early experiments in the 1600’s used amber to explore static electricity when two pieces were rubbed together. Or was it a piece of cloth against amber?  Online research fails to clarify.  Regardless, these 17^th century scientists coined the term “electricus”, and the experiments began. Early electrical charges, rudimentary circuits and transforming electrical energy into mechanical energy were all some of the first successful experiments.

And since we are doing a deep dive into etymology, where do we get the word “amber” from?

It turns out that while Latin came before Arabic, the modern-day name “Amber” comes from the Arabic word “anbar”, which was then adopted in Middle English (that awkward middle child between Old English and Modern English) as “ambergris” in the 14^th Century.  “Ambergris” was used to describe a solid waxy substance from the sperm whale.  The fossilized resin that we know and wear today was described as early as the late 13^th Century and later adopted into the English language by the early 15^th Century. 

It turns out electricity has been described through history almost as long as our modern name for Amber!