the.com/nitrification

means The microbial process that oxidizes ammonia first into nitrite and then into nitrate, converting waste nitrogen into a form plants can actually absorb.

from Built from 'nitrogen' plus the Latin-derived suffix '-fication' (from facere, 'to make'), itself tracing back through French 'nitre' and Latin 'nitrum' to Greek 'nitron' — an ancient word for natron/soda-like mineral salts. Chemists in the 1800s, once they'd pinned down nitrogen as an element, coined 'nitrify/nitrification' to name the newly understood soil-bacteria process — so the word is a 19th-century scientific label grafted onto a genuinely ancient mineral name.