This is for someone else (and for my curiosity) but could someone tell me the collective name for salts? The actual query is roughly when referring to Sodium sulphate, calcium carbonate, potassium ascorbate, aluminium diphosphate etc, is there a name or term which could be used to refer to the second part of these salts as a collective? Cheers Euphrosene
You can refer to it as a precipitate in crystalline form. You get a salt from the mixture of acid with base. Classic example: HCl + NaOH is in dynamic equlibrium to yield NaCl + H2O. Then again, it depends on what you are mixing (i.e. weak acid with strong base, strong acid with weak base, etc). I'm not sure if that's the answer you are looking for, but for simplicity sake you just call them salts and nothing else. You can also have hydrated salts (water of crystallization) in which moles of water are bonded to your salt. I remember baking the water out of these salts back in General Chemistry and then weighing them afterwards. The root names, -ate and -ite, are potentially indicative that the compound is a salt (depends on if it is crystaline), but you can have a wide variety of names. I'm not a chemistry expert so maybe you should wait until the right chemist comes along to answer your question.
I gather Sense About Science confirmed that 'anions' would do. But many thanks for responding, Euphrosene
