Chlorine

How to spell chlorine

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chlorine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chlorine mean?

1. nounA greenish-yellow chemical element widely used as a disinfectant and bleaching agent, especially in water treatment.

Chlorine in a sentence

• The pool attendant tested the water for the correct level of chlorine.

• Adding chlorine to the town supply kills harmful bacteria.

Where does chlorine come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Chlorine takes its name from the Greek word chloros, which meant 'pale green' or 'yellowish-green', the same colour the gas shows when it is collected in any quantity. The English chemist Humphry Davy coined the name in 1810, attaching the chemical suffix -ine that ends so many element and compound names. Davy was correcting an earlier mistaken idea that the gas contained oxygen; once he demonstrated it was an element in its own right, he named it purely for its distinctive colour. The very same chloros root survives in 'chlorophyll', the green pigment of plants, which is a handy memory link because both words begin with the silent-looking 'chl' cluster. That opening 'chl', pronounced simply as a hard 'k' followed by 'l', is the main spelling trap, since the 'h' after the 'c' is easy to drop when writing quickly.

How the word is built

• chlor- (from Greek chloros: pale green, yellowish-green)
• -ine (suffix naming chemical elements and substances)