salt
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: enpr: sŏlt
enpr: sôlt
ipa: /sɒlt/
ipa: /sɔːlt/
enpr: sôlt
ipa: /sɔlt/
enpr: sält
ipa: /sɑlt/
ipa: [sɑɫt]
ipa: [sɑɫʔ]
enpr: sŏlt
ipa: /sɔlt/
ipa: [sɔɯ̯t]
rhymes: -ɒlt
rhymes: -ɔːlt
Forms: form: salts
form: salting
form: salted
form: salted
Etymology: PIE word
 *séh₂ls
From Middle English salt, from Old English sealt, from Proto-West Germanic *salt, from Proto-Germanic *saltą, from Proto-Indo-European *séh₂ls (“salt”). Doublet of sal, ultimately from Latin sāl (“salt”), which it superseded as the general term for "salt".
Senses: examples: to salt fish, beef, or pork; to salt the city streets in the winter
synonyms: salt down
glosses: To add salt to.
examples: text: The brine begins to salt.
glosses: To deposit salt as a saline solution.
topics: nautical
transport
glosses: To fill with salt between the timbers and planks for the preservation of the timber.
raw_tags: of a ship
topics: business
mining
glosses: To insert or inject something into an object to give it properties it would not naturally have.
To blast metal into (as a portion of a mine) in order to cause to appear to be a productive seam.
topics: archaeology
history
human-sciences
sciences
glosses: To insert or inject something into an object to give it properties it would not naturally have.
To add bogus evidence to an archaeological site.
examples: text: The composition of the fallout can also be changed by "salting" the weapon to be detonated. This consists in the inclusion of significant quantities of certain elements, possibly enriched in specific isotopes, for the purpose of producing induced radioactivity. There are several reasons why a weapon might be salted.
ref: 1964, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, page 417:
glosses: To insert or inject something into an object to give it properties it would not naturally have.
To add certain chemical elements to (a nuclear or conventional weapon) so that it generates more radiation.
examples: text: They salted the document with arcane language.
text: The Libertarians wish we had won the Vietnamese War, they would like to revoke civil rights legislation, they believe (even though they are supposedly anti-state) in a stronger Pentagon. They are salted with Nixonites, Young Americans for Freedom, John Birchers, Reaganites — in other words the old Joe McCarthy gang again. I thought they had left us, or reformed, or taken up knitting.
ref: 1976 December 11, Ronnie Allen, “No Political Eunuch”, in Gay Community News, volume 4, number 24, page 4:
text: These were pamphlets, often written in various Jewish vernaculars, describing the location of the Holy sites and salting the accounts with mythic and homiletical materials.
ref: 1993, The Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy, page 154:
glosses: To sprinkle throughout.
topics: computing
cryptography
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
glosses: To add filler bytes before encrypting, in order to make brute-force decryption more resource-intensive.
examples: text: In this place were put to the ground and salted the houses of José Mascarenhas.
topics: government
military
politics
war
glosses: To render a thing useless.
To sow with salt (of land), symbolizing a curse on its re-inhabitation.
glosses: To render a thing useless.
To lock a page title so it cannot be created.
qualifier: wiki jargon
Derived terms: desalt
salt away
salt down
salt out
salt the earth
salt up
undersalt