[hugh3]

I was reading about this the other day, and the Arabic word for "electricity" (kahraba, apparently) is also based on the Arabic word for amber.

Chinese, on the other hand, just uses the word for "lightning". This might be a more logical choice, but it indicates that the Chinese didn't have a word for electricity until after it was discovered that lightning and electricity were actually the same thing, whereas Europeans had been using the word "electricity" since 1600ish and didn't prove the connection to lightning until the 1750s (though I assume it must have been suspected).