Why do we give ‘gas’? We’re riding something else, aren’t we?

Answer

The very first explosion engines did not run on petroleum derivatives, but on coal gas or light gas, which was widely available at the time.

Yet the expression probably comes from the petroleum derivatives, as the English gasoline (gasoline) and the French gazole (diesel) also show – in Spanish by the way resp. gasoleo and gasolina.

• The etymology of ‘gasoline’ has been disputed. In 1862 a certain John Cassell made ‘Cazeline’ for his patented fuel, which refers to his own name and therefore has nothing to do with gaseous states. A shrewd pharmacist in Dublin, Samuel Boyd, is said to have changed the brand name to ‘Gazeline’ to avoid paying Cassell. Besides that nice exotic story, the term ‘gas oil’ has been used for some time (see below), and the additive ‘-ine’ indicates a distillate thereof. In any case, the term ‘gasoline’ appears in the Oxford English Dictionnary as early as 1863, actually too soon for the Cassell word explanation. Most Anglophone countries today use the term ‘petrol’ (distinct from crude ‘petroleum’), in North America they often use ‘gasoline’, often abbreviated to ‘gas’ (which is confusing, for a liquid).
• The etymology of ‘gazole’ is much older, reaching as far as the 16th century, to indicate a state, usually in the context of petroleum derivatives, of what is intermediate between light gas and lubricating oil. Hence the composition.