Chloride

How to spell chloride

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chloride

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chloride mean?

1. nounA chemical compound of chlorine with another element or group, such as the chlorine ion in salts.

Chloride in a sentence

• The water sample was tested for high levels of chloride.

• Common table salt is sodium chloride.

Where does chloride come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Chloride is a modern scientific coinage that traces back to the Greek word khloros, meaning 'pale green' or 'greenish-yellow'. The chemist Sir Humphry Davy named the element chlorine in 1810 because the gas has a distinctive yellow-green colour, taking khloros and adding the element ending. The suffix -ide was then attached to mark a compound of that element with one other, so a chloride is a compound in which chlorine combines with another element, as in the familiar sodium chloride of common table salt. The same green-tinged root survives in the plant pigment chlorophyll and in the mineral chlorite, which is also greenish. The spelling trap lies right at the start: the silent 'h' after the 'c' comes straight from the Greek 'ch', and the ending is -ide, not -ied or -yde.

How the word is built

• chlor- (from Greek khloros: pale green)
• -ide (chemical suffix denoting a binary compound)