the.com/sulfide
Sulfur's way of bonding with metals, then ruining pipes, eggs, and your nostrils.
means A compound formed when sulfur bonds with a metal or other element — the chemical family behind everything from rotten-egg smell to the ore that metals get mined from.
from Built from 'sulfur' (Latin 'sulphur' or 'sulfur', a word so old its own roots are murky, possibly non-Indo-European) plus the chemistry suffix '-ide', which 19th-century chemists borrowed from 'oxide' to mark any compound of an element with something more electropositive — so sulfide simply means 'sulfur's compound,' coined as part of the systematic naming spree that gave us chloride, bromide, and the rest of that tidy family.
- rotten egg smell
- actually hydrogen sulfide, sulfide's volatile cousin
- ore origins
- most metal ores are sulfides, not oxides
- black tarnish
- silver turns black from silver sulfide in air
- deep sea life
- some bacteria eat sulfide instead of sunlight