Ammonia

How to spell ammonia

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ammonia

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ammonia mean?

1. nounA colourless gas with a sharp, pungent smell, made of nitrogen and hydrogen and widely used in cleaning products and fertilisers.

Ammonia in a sentence

• The cleaning solution gave off a strong smell of ammonia.

• Farmers rely on ammonia as a key ingredient in nitrogen fertiliser.

Where does ammonia come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Ammonia takes its name from the Egyptian god Ammon (Amun), whose great temple stood in the Libyan desert. Near that temple people gathered a salt later called sal ammoniac, literally 'salt of Ammon', which was ammonium chloride deposited from the dung and smoke of the camels and animals kept there. When the pungent alkaline gas was isolated and studied in the late 1700s, the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman and others reached back to that ancient salt and named the gas ammonia in scientific Latin around 1799. The element ammonium and the prefix 'amino-' in chemistry all descend from the same source, so a single Libyan shrine sits quietly behind a whole family of chemical terms. For spelling, remember the doubled m at the start, echoing the god's name Ammon, while the ending settles into the regular -ia of Latin scientific nouns.

How the word is built

• ammon- (from sal ammoniac, the salt of Ammon)
• -ia (chemical/Latin noun suffix)