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nitrogen

UK/ˈnaɪ.tɹə.d͡ʒən/US/ˈnaɪ.tɹə.d͡ʒən/
nounB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,691 of 15,258leans written

Nitrogen is the gas that makes up most of the air. Liquid nitrogen, nitrogen fertiliser, nitrogen in the atmosphere.

Almost four fifths of the air is this and almost nothing can use it, because the two atoms are bound so tightly — which is why fixing it into fertiliser was one of the great inventions and why lightning and certain bacteria matter so much to plants.

Robin Müller · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of nitrogen

  1. 1nounnitrogenThe gas that makes up most of the air.B1+

    “Liquid nitrogen is so cold that it freezes a flower instantly.”

nitrogen is a gas.

Where it comes from

French nitrogene was coined in 1790 from nitre, a salt, plus the Greek root for producing.

  1. French

    nitrogène

  2. English, today

    nitrogen

French nitrogène (coined by Q708011 in 1790). by surface analysis, nitro- + -gen. See also niter.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Chemistry & Elements

Practise this word

nitrogen in the wild

  • Ammonia is produced biologically in a process called nitrogen fixation, but even more is generated industrially by the Haber process.

    Ammonia

  • One nucleus goes on to become carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopes through a number of transformations in a repeating cycle.

    CNO cycle

  • The extremely strong triple bond in elemental nitrogen, the second strongest bond in any diatomic molecule after carbon monoxide (CO), dominates nitrogen chemistry.

    Nitrogen

  • The human body contains about 3% nitrogen by mass, the fourth most abundant element in the body after oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.

    Nitrogen

  • The compound is colorless, but samples tend to acquire a yellow cast over time due to decomposition into oxides of nitrogen.

    Nitric acid

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.