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When we add fluoride ions to water, to make it good for teeth, it's called fluoridation. When we add chloride ions to water, to kill microorganisms, it's called chlorination. In the latter case, the generally used name for the process doesn't match with the technical/jargon description.

Why is this? Is it that chlorination is an older invention, so the lay word for it reflects an older technical jargon? Or is there some subtlety about the processes themselves?

Dan Hulme
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3 Answers3

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First, I wish to say this question should have been asked in the chemistry forum.

Chlorination:
It is possible to have free un-ionised chlorine, the form of which is used for chlorination.

Fluoridation:
However, fluorine is too reactive to be found in its un-ionised state, hence fluoride. It is impossible to find fluorine at room temperatures. Therefore, it is impossible to fluorinate water. Moreover, it is the dynamics of fluoride ions, rather than fluorine, which mediate in calcium re-crystallization,

Blessed Geek
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    Agree >>>>>100% – anongoodnurse May 19 '14 at 08:19
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    Correction: It is not actually impossible but extremely inconvenient, expensive to sequester and contain fluorine gas. But it is still true that fluorination of water is an impossible and pointless feat. – Blessed Geek May 19 '14 at 08:25
  • Perhaps I'm just thinking about it too hard. In both cases, once the chemical is dissolved in the water, it's in an ionised form. Are you saying the difference is just because the 'original' chlorine is in its elemental form (i.e it's because of a chemical difference in the process, not a difference of etymology)? – Dan Hulme May 19 '14 at 10:55
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    @DanHulme: No, it's more clear-cut than that. In the case of fluoridation, it's the fluoride ions which are the active agent. In the case of chlorination, it's the chlorine gas, and the subsequently generated hypochlorite ions, which are the active agent. The by-product chloride ions do absolutely nothing, which is why it's not called chloridation. – DumpsterDoofus May 19 '14 at 12:09
  • The active agent is Chlorine, which oxidizes (i.e. receives electrons from) bacterial molecules and becomes its ionic state. Also when dissolved in water, Chlorine reacts with the water dynamically vacillating between being chlorine and chlorous, chloric acids. Therefore, you simply should accept it is chlorination and fluoridation. – Blessed Geek May 19 '14 at 12:14
  • Fluorine does exist in unionized form. It's even more reactive than chlorine, so could be used to disinfect water, but it's too expensive. – Anonymous May 19 '14 at 21:39
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    @Anonymous - If it exists in unionized form, you can bet the Koch brothers are against it. – Erik Kowal May 20 '14 at 09:16
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The simplest (and oldest) way to chlorinate water is to dissolve gaseous chlorine in it, though various chlorine-containing compounds such as calcium hypochlorite (also known as chloride of lime), sodium hypochlorite, or a chloramine can be used instead.

When you fluoridate water, you don't add gaseous fluorine to it (though if you did, then linguistically speaking, you would be fluorinating it -- however, in practice this is not feasible [see the comments above]); rather, you add a fluorine-containing compound to it.

The oldest method is by adding sodium fluoride (hence the term fluoridation), but today fluorosilicic acid or sodium fluorosilicate are also used.

Erik Kowal
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chlorin-ation
fluorid-ation

simple

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride

drop the last "e" - add "ation" - done!

DisplayName
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    This is not a terribly helpful answer, since chloride and fluorine are also things. – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft May 19 '14 at 16:48
  • The OP was asking about the lack of parallelism: the elements are chlorine and fluorine, both ending with -ine, and yet the processes are fluoridation (with a d) and chlorination (with an n). – bdesham May 19 '14 at 19:35
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    @bdesham but fluoridation has rather little to do with fluorine, but rather with fluoride. The reason for the lack of parallelism is because the base words they are derived from are not parallel, not because we are doing something different with those base words. – AJMansfield May 20 '14 at 01:52