apatite

History and Etymology for apatite

borrowed from German Apatit, from Greek apatáō, apatân "to deceive" (derivative of apátē "deceit, fraud," perhaps of substratal origin) + German -it -ite entry 1

Note: The term was introduced by the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817). It apparently first appeared, attributed to Werner, in Carl Abraham Gerhard's Grundriss des Mineralsystems (Berlin, 1786), p. 281. Werner himself described the mineral in "Geschichte, Karakteristik, und kurze chemische Untersuchung des Apatits," Bergmännisches Journal, 1. Band, 1. Stück (April, 1788), pp. 76-96. He accounts for the naming of the mineral on pp. 84-85: "Ich wies hierauf diesem Fossile, als einer eigenen Gattung, sogleich eine Stelle in dem Kalkgeschlechte an; und ertheilte ihm, — weil es bisher alle Mineralogen in seiner Bestimmung irre geführt hatte, — den Namen Apatit, den ich von dem griechischen Worte απατάω (decipio) bildete, und welcher so viel als Trügling sagt." ("I thereupon allocated to this fossil [i. e., substance dug out of the earth], as its own genus, a place in the calcium family; and conferred on it—because it had up to now led all mineralogists identifying it astray—the name apatite, which I formed from the Greek word apatáō ([I] deceive) and which says as much as [the word] deceiver.")