Saline

How to spell saline

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce saline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does saline mean?

1. adjectiveContaining or relating to salt, especially dissolved in water.
2. nounA sterile solution of salt in water used in medicine, for example to clean wounds or rehydrate patients.

Saline in a sentence

• adjective

  The coastal marsh has a high saline content that limits which crops will grow.

• noun

  The nurse flushed the wound with saline before applying a fresh dressing.

• adjective

  Engineers tested the saline water before approving the new desalination plant.

• noun

  The patient was placed on a drip of saline to restore lost fluids.

Where does saline come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin sal, meaning 'salt', a root so old and so central to daily life that it also gave us 'salary', because Roman soldiers were once paid an allowance connected with salt. From sal came the Latin adjective salinus, 'salty' or 'of salt', and the related noun salinae for the salt-pans where seawater was evaporated to harvest its crystals. English adopted saline in the 1400s, at first describing anything tasting or containing salt, and later it settled into its modern medical and chemical use for salt-bearing solutions. The spelling preserves the clean Latin sal, so remembering the link to 'salt' keeps the opening sal- secure; the trap is mainly the -ine ending, which sounds like 'line' yet follows the same pattern as 'feline' and 'canine'.

How the word is built

• sal- (from Latin sal: salt)
• -ine (adjective suffix meaning 'of the nature of')