Food and nutrition

The eleventh entry is a vitamina, and the single letter that separates it from the English word is the fossil of a claim that was withdrawn. The name was coined in 1912 by the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk, who had drawn from rice husks the substance that cures beriberi and supposed that all such indispensable trace substances belonged to one chemical family, the amines. He built the word to say so: vita, Latin for life, plus « amine », giving « vitamine », the amine of life. Within a few years it was plain that most of them are nothing of the sort — ascorbic acid contains no nitrogen at all — but the word had already spread too far to be replaced, so English compromised and cut off the final letter. « Vitamin » has made no chemical claim since. Portuguese never performed that amputation, and neither did French, Spanish or Italian: a vitamina still ends in the amine it does not contain. Nothing turns on this at the chemist’s counter, but it accounts for a spelling difference that otherwise looks like an irregularity with no reason behind it.