Since I’ve become interested in toxics and researching common household items which contain toxics, people have tried to correct me: “Don’t you mean toxin instead of toxic?”
No. I mean toxic. For a while, however, I didn’t have a good reason why I meant “toxic” instead of “toxin,” I’d just been told before that the former was the correct word for what I was talking about, but I had no real justification for that answer. So it occurred to me that I needed to figure out the real reason why I kept saying “toxic” and I should put up a post why. In order to get clarification on the differences of the words, I went to the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, which sits in our den at home and looked up the two words.
Toxic: --adj. 1. of, pertaining to, affected with, or caused by a toxin or poison 2. acting as or having the effect of a poison; poisonous --n. 3. a toxic chemical or other substance
Toxin: --n. any poison produced by an organism, characterized by antigenicity in certain animals and high molecular weight, and including the bacterial toxins that are the causative agents of tetanus, diphtheria, etc., and such plant and animal toxins as ricin and snake venim.
The key difference in these two words is “organism.” A toxin is a naturally occurring poison, produced by an organism while a toxic is not necessarily so. My understanding therefore is that a toxin is a toxic, but a toxic is not a toxin.
References:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxin
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic
• http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/34052/title/Toxic_yes_Toxins%3F_No
Saturday, September 19, 2009
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