This article is about the class of chemical compounds. For beverages containing ethanol, see alcoholic beverage. For other uses, see Alcohol (disambiguation). Ball-and-stick model of the hydroxyl (-OH) functional group in an alcohol molecule (R3COH). The three "R's" stand for carbon substituents or hydrogen atoms. The hydroxyl (-OH) functional group with bond angle In chemistry, an alcohol is any organic compound in which the hydroxyl functional group (-O H) is bound to a saturated carbon atom. The term alcohol originally referred to the primary alcohol ethyl alcohol (ethanol), the predominant alcohol in alcoholic beverages. The suffix -ol appears in the IUPAC chemical name of all substances where the hydroxyl group is the functional group with the highest priority; in substances where a higher priority group is present the prefix hydroxy- will appear in the IUPAC name. The suffix -ol in non-systematic names (such as paracetamol or cholesterol) also typically indicates that the substance includes a hydroxyl functional group and, so, can be termed an alcohol. But many substances, particularly sugars (examples glucose and sucrose) contain hydroxyl functional groups without using the suffix. An important class of alcohols are the simple acyclic alcohols, the general formula for which is CnH2n+1OH.