vitamine

In 1912, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk was working at the Lister Institute in London, trying to isolate the substance in rice husks that prevented beriberi. He succeeded in extracting a compound and, believing it was an amine (a nitrogen-containing organic molecule), coined the term 'vitamine' — from Latin vita ('life') and amine (the chemical class). Life-amine. The essential chemical of living.

The problem was that Funk's theory was only half right. The substance that prevented beriberi (later called vitamin B1, or thiamine) was indeed an amine. But as other essential nutrients were discovered through the 1910s and 1920s, it became clear that most of them were not amines at all. Vitamin C is an acid. Vitamin A is an alcohol. Vitamin D is a steroid. The name was chemically wrong for the majority of what it described.

In 1920, British biochemist Jack Drummond proposed dropping the final 'e' — changing 'vitamine' to 'vitamin' — to remove the implication of amine chemistry while keeping the recognizable term. The scientific community agreed. It was a rare case of a word being deliberately edited by committee. The correction was small enough that most people never noticed it happened.

By the 1930s, vitamins had become a consumer product. Advertisements promised health through supplements. The U.S. vitamin industry is now worth over $50 billion annually. Funk died in 1967, having lived to see his coined word become one of the most commercially powerful terms in the English language. He was right about the importance, wrong about the chemistry, and immortal in the dictionary.