The word alchemy comes from old French alquemie, alkimie, used in Medieval Latin as . This name was itself adopted from the Arabic word  (). The Arabic  in turn was a borrowing of the Late Greek term khēmeía (), also spelled khumeia () and khēmía (), with al- being the Arabic definite article the. Together this association can be interpreted as the process of transmutation by which to fuse or reunite with the divine or original form. Several etymologies have been proposed for the Greek term. The first was proposed by Zosimos of Panopolis (3rd–4th centuries), who derived it from the name of a book, the Khemeu. Hermann Diels argued in 1914 that it rather derived from χύμα, used to describe metallic objects formed by casting.
Others trace its roots to the Egyptian name  (hieroglyphic 𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖  ), meaning black earth, which refers to the fertile and auriferous soil of the Nile valley, as opposed to red desert sand. According to the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, the Arabic word ʾ actually means "the Egyptian [science]", borrowing from the Coptic word for "Egypt",  (or its equivalent in the Mediaeval Bohairic dialect of Coptic, ). This Coptic word derives from Demotic , itself from ancient Egyptian . The ancient Egyptian word referred to both the country and the colour "black" (Egypt was the "black Land", by contrast with the "red Land", the surrounding desert).