Nitrate

How to spell nitrate

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nitrate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nitrate mean?

1. nounA salt or ester of nitric acid, widely used in fertilisers, food preservation, and explosives.

Nitrate in a sentence

• The farmer spread a nitrate fertiliser across the depleted field.

• Water tests showed a high nitrate level from agricultural runoff.

Where does nitrate come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a chemistry term coined in the late 1700s from 'nitre' (also spelled niter), the old name for potassium nitrate or saltpetre, plus the suffix '-ate' that chemists use to name the salts and esters of an acid. 'Nitre' itself travelled a long way: it came through Latin 'nitrum' from Greek 'nitron', the word for a naturally occurring soda or natron used in ancient times for cleaning and embalming, and the Greek word in turn echoes far older Egyptian and Semitic names for the same mineral deposits. A nitrate is therefore literally the salt of nitric acid, the acid built on that same 'nitr-' root. The element nitrogen was named from exactly this family, because the gas was identified as a component of nitre. The spelling trap is the ending: '-ate' marks this compound, while the closely related '-ite' gives the different compound 'nitrite', so the final vowel really does change the chemistry.

How the word is built

• nitr- (from Greek nitron, native soda or natron)
• -ate (chemical suffix marking a salt or ester of an acid)