The Name of the – ose: An Editorial on Carbohydrate Nomenclature

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Price NPJ. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. What’s in a name? The term ‘sugar’ is usually applied to the monosaccharides, disaccharides, and lower oligosaccharides. Historically, sugars were often named after their source, for example, grape sugar for glucose, cane sugar for saccharose (later called sucrose), wood sugar for xylose, and fruit sugar for fructose (fruchtzucker, fructose). The term ‘carbohydrate’ (from the French ‘hydrate de carbone’) was originally used only for monosaccharides, because their composition can be expressed as Cn(H2O)n. Glucose was named in 1838, although much later than this Kekule suggested ‘dextrose’ because glucose is dextrorotatory. About the same time it was agreed that all sugars should be named with the ending ‘-ose’. Long before its structure was known cellulose was proposed by combination of ‘-ose’ with ‘cellule’, the French word for cell.