Meaning of pH

 Hello, In today’s lesson, we would discuss about a term that has come up once before in our discussion and I promised to delve into more details about it at a latter time. 


Hence, we are going to look at the meaning of the term pH. In our lesson today, we would try to understand the meaning of pH.


The term "pH" was first described by Danish biochemist Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen in 1909. pH is an abbreviation for "power of hydrogen" where "p" is short for the German word for power, potenz and H is the element symbol for hydrogen. The H is capitalized because it is standard to capitalize element symbols. The abbreviation also works in French, with “pouvoir hydrogen” translating as "the power of hydrogen.”


In today’s language, we understand the pH to be the negative logarithm of hydrogen ion concentration. That is;

pH = -log(H^+)

Or

pH = -log(H3O^+)


In tomorrow’s lesson, we shall try to understand the pH scale and how the scale works. See you then!


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