ScienceJuly 17, 2026

sulphide

SUL-fide

Definition

A chemical compound containing sulfur combined with a more electropositive element or radical.

Etymology

The word is formed from 'sulfur' and the chemical suffix '-ide', which was adopted in the 18th century to designate binary compounds.

In the news

In the article, the term appears during the description of the Curies' extraction process, where they repeatedly precipitated sulfides as part of the chemical purification of radium.

Marie Curie and her husband Pierre spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed with no ventilation to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride, and the notebooks she kept during those years are still so radioacti

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