Citrate

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈsɪtɹeɪt/

Definitions

1. A chemical compound that acts as a salt or ester of citric acid, commonly utilized in metabolic reactions and various industrial applications
2. An organic compound formed from citric acid, serving roles in biochemistry and as an additive in food production
3. A chemical substance derived from citric acid that functions as a salt or ester and is involved in metabolic processes and used in food and pharmaceutical industries

Etymology: Citrate is a plainly technical coinage: it is simply citric acid with the chemical suffix "-ate" attached. The base word, citric acid, comes from the Latin "citrus", meaning citrus fruit, which is why the acid was named after lemons and their relatives, where chemists first isolated it. The suffix "-ate" has a long history of its own. It descends from Latin "-atus", a formation used to make adjectives and nouns, and it passed into English through the Old French and Latin scientific vocabulary. Chemists adopted it to name the salts and esters formed when an acid reacts with a base or an alcohol, so "sulfate", "nitrate" and "citrate" follow the same pattern. The result is a name that tells you its origin at a glance: a citrate is the citric-acid-derived salt or ester, named by the same logic that gives every other "-ate" compound its ending.