Carbonate

How to spell carbonate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce carbonate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carbonate mean?

1. nounA salt or compound containing the carbonate ion, formed from carbonic acid.
2. verbTo charge a liquid with carbon dioxide so that it becomes fizzy.

Carbonate in a sentence

• noun

  The geologist tested the rock for calcium carbonate before logging the sample.

• verb

  The machine can carbonate plain tap water at the press of a button.

• noun

  Hard water often leaves a carbonate deposit inside the kettle.

• verb

  Brewers carbonate the beer in sealed tanks before bottling.

Where does carbonate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the Latin carbo, which meant a piece of coal or charcoal, and its stem carbon-. When chemists in the late eighteenth century began naming the element at the heart of all living matter, they coined 'carbon' from that Latin root, and 'carbonate' followed as the standard name for a salt formed from carbonic acid. The -ate ending is the regular chemical suffix used across the science for such salts, as in 'sulphate' and 'nitrate', and it later did double duty as a verb ending meaning 'to combine or charge with'. The verb sense, to fill a liquid with carbon dioxide gas, became common in the nineteenth century alongside the rise of fizzy bottled drinks. The spelling stays close to its source: 'carbon' plus '-ate', with the unstressed middle vowel being the only spot where a writer might hesitate.

How the word is built

• carbon (from Latin carbo: coal, charcoal)
• -ate (chemical salt / verb suffix)