Why do many local anesthetic drug names end in -caine?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

It is a standard medical convention to end the names of synthetic local anesthetics with the suffix -caine in honor of cocaine.1

Cocaine was the first substance discovered to have local anesthetic properties, famously introduced for use in eye surgery by Carl Koller in 1884. Because cocaine is a naturally occurring alkaloid that can be toxic and addictive, researchers sought to develop safer, synthetic alternatives. When these new compounds were created—such as procaine (introduced in 1905) and lidocaine—the suffix was adopted to signify their pharmacological relationship to the original anesthetic agent.1234