Other forms: salts, salted, salting
Salt is the white, grainy stuff you shake over food to bring the taste out. A pinch on chips, a spoonful thrown into the pasta water, the crust on a pretzel.
Most of us eat more of it than we should, but nothing alive can do without it entirely — plants and animals both need it. Chemists call it sodium chloride, and people have been drying it out of seawater and digging it out of mines for thousands of years. Salt is a verb too: you salt your food, and the council salts the roads when ice is forecast. It also turns up in phrases that have nothing to do with cooking — an old salt is a sailor who has spent years at sea, and taking something with a pinch of salt means believing only part of it.
1nounsaltThe white grains used to season and preserve food.~72%
“She added a pinch of salt to the soup.”
Patterna pinch of salt · salt and pepper · add / sprinkle salt · salt water · salty
synonyms: table salt, sea salt
2nounchemistryIn chemistry, any compound formed when an acid reacts with a metal.~22%
“Epsom salts and table salt are both salts to a chemist.”
3nounsalinityThe salty taste itself.~2%
synonyms: saltiness, salinity
4verbscatterTo scatter salt over something — food, or an icy road.~2%
“They salt the motorway before every frost.”
5verbpackTo pack food in salt so that it keeps.~2%
“Sailors lived on salted beef for months at a time.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 82 of them on a sense (58 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
salt is a mineral.
SALT → the SEA you can taste
Swim in the sea and your mouth tastes of it for an hour: salt, the white grains you put on your food.
hooks ontosea
Latin sal meant salt, and salt was worth money. A Roman soldier drew a salarium — an allowance to buy it. The allowance outlived the salt, and became the word for being paid at all. Salt, salary and salsa are all the same root.
Proto-Indo-European
*sḗh₂l — salt
Proto-Germanic
*saltą
Proto-West Germanic
*salt
Old English
sealt
Middle English
salt
English, today
salt
From Middle English salt, from Old English sealt, from Proto-West Germanic salt, from Proto-Germanic saltą, from Proto-Indo-European sḗh₂l (“salt”). a doublet of sal and salary and salsa, all ultimately from Latin sāl (“salt”), which it superseded as the general term for "salt". Cognate with Dutch zout, German Salz, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish salt.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA