Eli5 Distilled liquid

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What does it mean when water or alcohol is distilled? Is there a stilled water?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Others have described what distillation is, but your question also asked about the word itself. The “dis” in distill is not an “opposite” prefix like dismount (the opposite of mount) or dislike (the opposite of like). Distill is not the opposite of “till” (or “still”).

Instead, the word comes from a di- or de- prefix in Latin or French, meaning “down” and an ancient word “still” coming from Latin “stillare” meaning to trickle in tiny droplets. Other examples of that prefix are “desire” which is not the opposite of “sire”, and “decant” which is not the opposite of “cant”. The change from e to i is just an annoying fact of language change.

So “distill” comes from the part of the process where the drops form and trickle down into a container. The word “still”, meaning the device for distilling, comes from “distill” and not the other way around.

The adjective “still” meaning “not moving” is actually a completely different word, with a completely different origin. It comes from Old German or Dutch words like “stilli” that just happen to sound similar.

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