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mmmMMMmmm, Essense, yessss
Naphtha and benzene are actually different chemicals, though...
Yea yea I know they're all hydrocarbons but it's still funny.
AfaIk, Naphta is just a relatively light fraction of crude oil, i.e. a mixture of different chemicals, not gaseous, but partly volatile.
In Germany, fuel (Ottokraftstoff) is called Benzin, and was originally a mixture of 60 % Benzin (Naphta, alkanes and cyclic alkanes) and 40 % Benzene (Benzol).
Benzene and Benzine are not the same thing. I don't like what the creator did here.
In my country nafta is crude oil, and benzinas is gasoline, which afaik neither is actually "correct"
Huh. That’s how it kind of is in Arabic.
I never put it together that what we call “Naft/Nuft” (نَفط) is related to Naphtha. Fuel is “Benzeen” (بنزين).
Its not its called "Benzino", which is like the latin equivalent of calling gas "gasoline".
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Algerian here, the most common word used to talk about "gas" here is actually the french word essence, since darja(what people actually speak) is just a weird amalgamate of french, Arabic and Berber that really don't get along well.
I know this Map just took the official languages, so I don't wanna call it inacuratd, but just wanted to point this out.
wow I've never heard of a language like that in Algeria. I always assumed you all spoke a dialect of Arabic and some French.
Darja?? I'm gonna be reading about this for the next hour. merci!
Darja is technically a dialect, even if (at least from my experience) it is barely intelligible to most people from saudi Arabia and such, I often end up speaking English in such cases.
Darja is sorta like Scots in that way tbh, basically a sister language / dialect of Arabic in a similar way to what Scots is for English.
In China it's 汽油 which basically means "gas oil". It's a verbatim translation of gasoline.
while in Taiwan it's 石油, which basically means "rock/petr oil", verbatim translation of petrol
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Essence sounds so fucking cool, like some offering to appease the machine gods
Yeah essence sounds magical. Smh fits french.
I’ve called it essence all my life without giving it a thought, and I’m delighted to see the reactions the word is getting here.
I’m guessing it’s actually a chemical term?
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In Czech Repulic, Nafta is diesel.
Calling it "essence" is fucking weird.
Still better than calling it "Others". How does that even work?
China is a pretty big country to just skip like this lol. They call it Qiyou
I guess they just skipped countries that have a unique name for it
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Pretty big miss to not include Quebec in the "essence" category, or at least to do a striped pattern
I suddenly understand the name of the gas station “Esso”.
S O: Standard Oil
I’m a native French speaker and I had never realised that before reading your comment, lol.
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Um excuse me but Koreans call it 휘발유 which means 揮發油 which means Volatile Oil.
who the fuck called that la gasolina?
A gas is not a liquid, change my mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_natural_gas
Substitute natural gas (SNG), or synthetic natural gas, is a fuel gas (predominantly methane, CH4) that can be produced from fossil fuels such as lignite coal, oil shale, or from biofuels (when it is named bio-SNG) or using electricity with power-to-gas systems.
So we've got "gas" in the US (short for "gasoline"), which is a liquid. There's liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which is also a liquid. And there's synthetic natural gas.
EDIT: Bonus: my understanding is that in Germany, an unqualified "gas" tends to refer to natural gas, which Germany is presently importing in liquid form (liquified natural gas, or LNG).
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I have never filled my car's tank with "a gas," I fill it with gas, which is short for gasoline. That abbreviation being a homonym for gas, a chemical phase, is merely an unfortunate coincidence.
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I like “essence”
Give me a full tank of Others please!
Why would you call it gas? It's a liquid?
The first commercially available version was Gazoline named after somebody.
Also, it's the vapors that are combustable not the liquid.
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“Naphta” immediately makes me think of “naphtaline” balls, which were used to repel moths from closets a few generations ago — it’s been banned since for being kinda carcinogenic. I’ve never seen it used, and didn’t know that it was made from petroleum.
Spain has many languages, in Catalan is benzene and I think in Aragonese is the same.
Not gonna lie, that’s an odd choice of name from China.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1lf63hv/whats_gasoline_called_in_each_asian_countries/
It sounds like it's not entirely consistent across China and the translation is somewhat-debatable, but a translation for China might be "gas-oil", "stone-oil", or "steam-oil".
汽油 (gas, as in state of matter + oil) refers to petrol/gasoline, the kind you put in cars.
石油 (stone oil) is refers to oil, as in the natural resource (such as crude).
原油 (origin oil) refers specifically to crude oil.
柴油 (kindling oil) refers to diesel.
加油 (add oil) is used to mean refilling the car with petrol.
And finally, 机油 (motor oil) is engine oil.
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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