| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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4. Science Terms: Distinctions, Restrictions, and Confusions
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| § 4. albumin / albumen |
| The evolution of the words albumin and albumen represents a cockeyed sort of chicken and egg story. Did albumin, spelled with an i and representing a member of a class of proteins found in plants and animals, come first? Or was albumen, spelled with an e and describing the “white” of an egg, the progenitor? In this lexical tale, the egg wins. Albumen comes from Latin albus, “white,” and as early as the 16th century, it was used to refer to the white of an egg. By the 1800s, albumen was being used to describe the substance that was a constituent of fluids and tissues of animals and of the roots and seeds of plants. Chemists in the mid-1800s, though, began to put a finer edge to things, determining that the type of protein represented by egg whites was part of a larger class of proteins that were chemically similar but had different forms and functions. The class of proteins came to be known as scleroproteins and the protein present in the white of an egg came to be called albumin. Thus we can say The albumen of an egg is an excellent example of animal albumin. Albumin comes from the combination of album(en) with the suffix -in, “neutral chemical compound.” In addition to egg whites, this water-soluble, heat-coagulating protein is found in blood serum and milk. | 1 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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