Gasoline
Etymology

The American English word gasoline denotes fuel for automobiles, which common usage shortened to the terms gas, or rarely motor gas and mogas, thus differentiating it from avgas (aviation gasoline), which is fuel for airplanes. English dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, show that the term gasoline originates from gas plus the chemical suffixes -ole and -ine. However, a blog post at the defunct website Oxford Dictionaries alternatively proposes that the word may have originated from the surname of British businessman John Cassell, who supposedly first marketed the substance.

In place of the word gasoline, most Commonwealth countries (except Canada), use the term "petrol", and North Americans more often use "gas" in common parlance, hence the prevalence of the usage gas station in the United States.

Coined from Medieval Latin, the word petroleum (L. petra, rock + oleum, oil) initially denoted types of mineral oil derived from rocks and stones. In Britain, Petrol was a refined mineral oil product marketed as a solvent from the 1870s by the British wholesaler Carless Refining and Marketing Ltd. When Petrol found a later use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to John Leonard, owner of Carless, that they trademark the word and uppercase spelling Petrol. The trademark application was refused because petrol had already become an established general term for motor fuel. Due to the firm's age, Carless retained the legal rights to the term and to the uppercase spelling of "Petrol" as the name of a petrochemical product.

British refiners originally used "motor spirit" as a generic name for the automotive fuel and "aviation spirit" for aviation gasoline. When Carless was denied a trademark on "petrol" in the 1930s, its competitors switched to the more popular name "petrol". However, "motor spirit" had already made its way into laws and regulations, so the term remains in use as a formal name for petrol. The term is used most widely in Nigeria, where the largest petroleum companies call their product "premium motor spirit". Although "petrol" has made inroads into Nigerian English, "premium motor spirit" remains the formal name that is used in scientific publications, government reports, and newspapers.

Some other languages use variants of gasoline. Gasolina is used in Spanish and Portuguese, and gasorin is used in Japanese. In other languages, the name of the product is derived from the hydrocarbon compound benzene, or more precisely from the class of products called petroleum benzine, such as benzin in German or benzina in Italian; but in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the colloquial name nafta is derived from that of the chemical naphtha.

Some languages, like French and Italian, use the respective words for gasoline to instead indicate diesel fuel.
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