Like ethanol, butanol can be produced by fermentation processes. Saccharomyces yeast are known to produce these higher alcohols at temperatures above 75 °F (24 °C). The bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum can feeds on cellulose to produce butanol on an industrial scale.
The word alcohol appears in English as a term for a very fine powder in the sixteenth century. It was borrowed from French, which took it from medical Latin.
Ultimately the word is from the Arabic كحل (al-kuḥl, "kohl, a powder used as an eyeliner"). Al- is the Arabic definitive article, equivalent to the in English; alcohol was originally used for the very fine powder produced by the sublimation of the natural mineral stibnite to form antimony sulfide Sb2S3 (hence the essence or "spirit" of the substance), which was used as an antiseptic, eyeliner, and cosmetic (see kohl (cosmetics)) According to this theory, the meaning of alkuhul would have been first extended to distilled substances in general, and then narrowed to ethanol.[33]
Bartholomew Traheron, in his 1543 translation of John of Vigo, introduces the word as a term used by "barbarous" (Moorish) authors for "fine powder." Vigo wrote: the barbarous auctours use alcohol, or (as I fynde it sometymes wryten) alcofoll, for moost fine poudre.
The 1657 Lexicon Chymicum by William Johnson glosses the word as antimonium sive stibium. By extension, the word came to refer to any fluid obtained by distillation, including "alcohol of wine," the distilled essence of wine. Libavius in Alchymia (1594) refers to vini alcohol vel vinum alcalisatum. Johnson (1657) glosses alcohol vini as quando omnis superfluitas vini a vino separatur, ita ut accensum ardeat donec totum consumatur, nihilque fæcum aut phlegmatis in fundo remaneat. The word's meaning became restricted to "spirit of wine" (the chemical known today as ethanol) in the 18th century and was extended to the class of substances so-called as "alcohols" in modern chemistry after 1850.
However, this derivation is dubious since the current Arabic name for alcohol (ethanol) is الغول al-ġawl – properly meaning "spirit" or "demon" – with the sense "the thing that gives the wine its headiness" (in the Qur'an sura 37 verse 47).[33]
The term ethanol was invented 1838, modeled on the German word äthyl (Liebig), which is in turn based on Greek aither ether and hyle "stuff."[34]
Alcohols have an odor that is often described as "biting" and as "hanging" in the nasal passages. Ethanol has a slightly sweeter (or more fruit-like) odor than the other alcohols.
In general, the hydroxyl group makes the alcohol molecule polar. Those groups can form hydrogen bonds to one another and to other compounds (except in certain large molecules where the hydroxyl is protected by steric hindrance of adjacent groups[35]). This hydrogen bonding means that alcohols can be used as protic solvents. Two opposing solubility trends in alcohols are: the tendency of the polar OH to promote solubility in water, and the tendency of the carbon chain to resist it. Thus, methanol, ethanol, and propanol are miscible in water because the hydroxyl group wins out over the short carbon chain. Butanol, with a four-carbon chain, is moderately soluble because of a balance between the two trends. Alcohols of five or more carbons such as pentanol and higher are effectively insoluble in water because of the hydrocarbon chain's dominance. All simple alcohols are miscible in organic solvents.
Because of hydrogen bonding, alcohols tend to have higher boiling points than comparable hydrocarbons and ethers. The boiling point of the alcohol ethanol is 78.29 °C, compared to 69 °C for the hydrocarbon hexane (a common constituent of gasoline), and 34.6 °C for diethyl ether.
Alcohols, like water, can show either acidic or basic properties at the -OH group. With a pKa of around 16-19, they are, in general, slightly weaker acids than water, but they are still able to react with strong bases such as sodium hydride or reactive metals such as sodium. The salts that result are called alkoxides, with the general formula RO− M+.
Meanwhile, the oxygen atom has lone pairs of nonbonded electrons that render it weakly basic in the presence of strong acids such as sulfuric acid. For example, with methanol: