acid

comparative acider · superlative acidest

1. Sour, sharp, or biting to the taste; tart; having the taste of vinegar.

   acid fruits or liquors

2. figurativelySour-tempered.

   His response was harsh and acid.

   3 more examples

   His voice was as stern and his face as acid as ever.

   1864, Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, 2nd edition, volume 2, Smith, Elder & Co., page 235

   It must be admitted that Challenger is provocative in the last degree, but Summerlee has an acid tongue, which makes matters worse.

   1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy—[…]—distilling therefrom an acid envy that robbed her napoleon of all its flavor.

   1914 November, Louis Joseph Vance, “An Outsider […]”, in Munsey’s Magazine, volume LIII, number II, New York, N.Y.: The Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Company, […], published 1915, →OCLC, chapter I (Anarchy), page 373, column 2

3. Of or pertaining to an acid; acidic.

   acid soils

   1 more example

   Like other nyssas, it is in nature a creature of swampy places and looks loveliest where massed close to water and reflected in it, but justifies itself elsewhere if the soil is moist and acid, succeeding in wet clay.

   1975, Peter N. Barber, Cecil Ernest Lucas Phillips, The Trees Around Us, page 101

4. entertainmentDenoting a musical genre that is a distortion (as if hallucinogenic) of an existing genre, as in acid house, acid jazz, acid rock.

plural acids

1. countableuncountableA sour substance.
2. countableuncountablechemistryAny compound which yields H+ ions (protons) when dissolved in water; an Arrhenius acid.

   SE onset depends on a complex network of interactions among plant growth regulators, mainly auxins and cytokinins, during the proembryogenic early stages, and ethylene and gibberellic and abscisic acids later in the development of somatic embryos.

   2015 August 18, Clelia De-la-Peña et al., “The role of chromatin modifications in somatic embryogenesis in plants”, in Frontiers in Plant Science, volume 6, →DOI

3. countableuncountablechemistryAny compound that easily donates protons to a base; a Brønsted acid.
4. countableuncountablechemistryAny compound that can accept a pair of electrons to form a covalent bond; a Lewis acid.
5. countableuncountableAny corrosive substance.

   You are in error. / This is terror. / This is your banishment. This land is mine. / This is what you earn. / This is the Law of No Return. / This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine. / This is my history, this my race / And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.

   2006, James Fenton, Jerusalem

6. slanguncountableLSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.

   In the end, though, there is one sure way to distinguish a real hippie from his assorted sympathizers: hippies drop acid. That is, real hippies frequently, if irregularly, ingest LSD.

   1967, Joe David Brown, editor, The Hippies, New York: Time, Inc, page 171

1. abbreviationacronymuncountablecomputingAcronym of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, a set of properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably.

   SQLite relies on native file locking and page journaling to implement ACID properties.

   2007, Sibsankar Haldar, Inside SQLite, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 31