["Words of Science and the History Behind Them" is] entertaining and informative…. Isaac Asimov, who has written science fiction and science truth, here discusses almost 1,500 scientific terms under 250 alphabetized headings, one to a page. The result is that Enzyme and Equator glare at each other incongruously from opposite pages, as they might in a dictionary. But this is no dictionary, nor even a comprehensive reference work. Yet it is packed with information about the meanings and derivations of words and the stories behind them, and it would appeal to any youthful reader with even slight scientific curiosity.

The discovery that an aneroid barometer is a "not wet" barometer, that a centrifugal force is one that flees from the center and a centripetal force is one that moves toward the center, that centigrade is the scale of "a hundred steps" from melting to boiling and that a telescope is...