chemistry

The ch in chemistry is said as k, which marks it as Greek by way of Latin — the same transliteration of the letter chi that gives chorus, character and architect. The word itself is English-made, though: chemist plus the ending -ry, first recorded about 1600, when it still meant alchemy.

Its history is the history of a discipline pulling itself out of another one. For the first half-century of the word's life, chemistry and alchemy were the same pursuit. Chemistry separated in the mid-1600s, in step with the founding of the new scientific academies — the Accademia del Cimento in 1657, the Royal Society in 1660, the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1666 — and the modern sense of the scientific study of what things are made of dates only from 1788. The figurative chemistry between two people is older than the science, going back to the alchemical sense around 1600.

chemistry
(n.)
c. 1600, "alchemy," from
chemist
+
-ry
; also see
chemical
(adj.). The meaning "natural physical process" is from 1640s; the sense of "scientific study of the composition of material things and the changes they undergo" is by 1788. Chemistry in the European mind disengaged itself from alchemy in the mid-1600s; The
Academy del Cimento
was established in Italy in 1657, the Royal Society in London in 1660, and the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1666.
The figurative sense of "instinctual attraction or affinity" is also attested by c. 1600, from the alchemical sense.
also from c. 1600

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