Chlorid

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A salt or compound formed when chlorine combines with another element or group, such as the sodium compound found in table salt
2. Any chemical compound in which chlorine is bonded to a less electronegative element, commonly found in minerals and seawater
3. A negatively charged chlorine ion or the binary compound it forms, as in the common salts dissolved in seawater

Etymology: Chlorid is simply an older spelling of chloride, and the story behind the word is a chemist's deliberate naming. In 1812, the British chemist Humphry Davy coined "chloride" by joining "chlorine" to the suffix "-ide", the ending he used to mark a binary compound of an element with another substance. Chlorine itself had been named only a few years earlier, in 1810, from the Greek "chlōros", meaning pale green, a reference to the gas's colour. The "-ide" ending was a systematic device in early nineteenth-century chemistry, letting names signal composition in the way "oxide" already did for compounds with oxygen. Chlorid simply keeps the older spelling that dropped the final "e", which was common in chemical names of that period.

Synonyms: chloride