A fact from Hydroxide appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 5 January 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that the hydroxide ion is a natural constituent of water? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2011/January.

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why did (naoh) change his color when we mixed with (hcl)?

From what I remember

NaOH + HCl --> NaCl + H₂O

where both the reactants and products are clear. If you also added [universal indicator] then NaOH would be a blue/purple colour, HCl a yellow/red colour and the products a green colour (if equal amounts of NaOH + HCl used). Hope this helps - Oatzy 21:08 GMT 04/10/05

A Hydroxide is not a ion... OH^- is one --Helios89 10:35, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

well... it depends on how u define the word hydroxide. different people may have different perception of its meaning. in the article, hydroxide refers to the ion containing O and H atoms with a negative charge(OH-). while some of us might have understood it as any alkali substances that have a pH value greater than 7. perhaps "ion" should be added to the title to avoid confusion?

 A physics professor and his assistant are working on liberating negatively charged hydroxyl ions, when all of a sudden,
 the assistant says, "Wait, Professor! What if the salicylic acids do not accept the hydroxyl ions?" And the professor
 responds, "That's no hydroxyl ion! That's my wife!"

I don't get it :-( --Slashdevslashtty 02:40, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't get it either...

I get it, and its the worst joke I've ever heard. I'm sad

It's a joke from an early episode of the Cartoon Network cartoon "Dexter's Laboratory". It's not funny, and it's not very original. cobalt91 00:03, 14 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For those of us who don't get it, will someone please explain! Even if it is bad, I'm the kind of person who wants to know :-( Poobarb 00:33, 3 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the joke is that there is nothing to get. ArcherMan86 (talk) 03:48, 3 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, isn't the molar mass of OH- about 17 g/mol, not 19?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jschwart37 (talk • contribs) 06:53, 4 March 2007 (UTC).[reply]

I think the molar mass is still wrong. If hydrogen is approximately 1.01 and oxygen 16 then that makes it 17.01 g mol^-1. Even being more precise (and assuming the pages on oxygen and hydrogen are correct), it must have a mass of a least 17.00734g mol^-1. A minor niggle I know, but these things do affect calculations.78.86.129.231 18:46, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• right now its about 17.00274. It may not be the same number you calculated, but it is at a relatively insignificant place. If your calculations require that amount of precision or the numbers will be greatly affected, I'm sure there are other places you would be looking for the molar mass of OH- than the wikipedia article. Also the degree of precision of the other articles on the elements may be questionable. oxygen can be written as 16.00 or 15.994 or other variations depending on the necessity of significant figures. It seems fine to me. I wouldnt care if it were changed to 17.00734. calculations shouldnt be dependent on wikipedia. Gremlack 01:13, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article has to be completety reviewed. The correct chemical formula is HO^- and not OH^-. This a common mistake, yet, wikipedia should not have these mistakes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.136.24.66 (talk) 17:03, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That is odd... every chemistry text I have ever read has referred to hydroxide as OH^-, I have never seen it wrote as HO^-. I don't think it is a mistake unless 98% of the people on this planet are making this same mistake (including the people who write chemistry textbooks, who have PhD's in chemistry...)

No, he is right, the correct formula for the hydroxide ion is HO-. If you understand anything about formal charges and lewis structures you would understand why. A chemistry professor that I know who has a Ph.D also uses HO-. The textbooks that go by "OH-" are trying to follow "tradition." They are wrong however. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.70.58.59 (talk) 14:13, 12 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not HO^- or OH^- is correct is fairly irrelevant to wikipedia. Wikipedia is made to reflect the common usage, not the correct usage, and therefore the proper usage on wikipedia is OH^-. As an aside, I disagree with your professor, HO^- is slightly more correct than OH^-, but neither are as correct as [OH]^-, since HO^- promotes the ridiculous idea that the oxygen atom somehow "owns" the negative charge. This would result in a fairly substantial error in the stability of the ion if it were taken as true. Equilshift (talk) 21:53, 29 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Completely! Petergans (talk) 22:53, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is an ambiguous definition. There are several ions of hydrogen possessing sharply different properties. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 06:43, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How comes? There are anions and cations, of hydrogen, deuterium, tritium, water, and larger HO molecules, which have their different names. Surely, hydrogen ion is a jargon, as many other terms, but this way water is ambiguous too as it can be deuterated, etc. I agree that technically there was some ambiguity in "ion" actually meaning "cation" and tried to correct that in the article. Materialscientist (talk) 07:00, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you use such complication as [[hydrogen ion|hydrogen cation]]? Why not just hydrogen cation? Water (as H₂O) is not ambiguous – it forms almost the same isosceles triangle with approximately 104° angle whatever protium vs deuterium, ¹⁶O vs ¹⁷O, or solid vs liquid vs vapour. BTW I am in doubt that the ice have a significant dissociation, and that the water vapour has a dissociation so high as the liquid water has. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 07:12, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No specific reason, for [[hydrogen ion|hydrogen cation]], hydrogen cation is also a redirect which normally should be [[Hydron (chemistry)|hydrogen cation]]. Materialscientist (talk) 07:22, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Incnis Mrsi seems to be coming from an area other than chemistry. In chemistry the term hydrogen ion is universally understood to mean H⁺, which in solution is solvated. There is no ambiguity in the context of this article, which is about the chemistry of the hydroxide ion. There is no need to specify cation as H^- is known as the hydride ion. Petergans (talk) 09:44, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

OK, if there are plenty of degreed chemists in en.WP, possessing a "true" knowledge about "hydrogen ions", then why this page hangs as something-not-really-an-article-nor-a-dab for several years? Why was it not redirected or merged with hydron (chemistry)? Why this latter contained nothing but a crap until very recently? Give some advices how to fix these dabs which are not dabs and articles which are not articles, and probably, there will be less future confusion. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 10:03, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's nothing to do with true knowledge. All chemistry textbooks and research papers refer to the hydrogen ion or proton or hydronium ion. The term hydron has not been accepted for general use by the chemistry community. BTW, what is a "dab"? Petergans (talk) 14:21, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Incnis Mrsi, please understand that we do not use the term "hydron" in chemistry, so please do not try to force this obscure term on this community. We prefer to spend our editing on content, not nomenclature.--Smokefoot (talk) 18:00, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What was wrong with these links removed by this[1] edit? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 06:43, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What was wrong with the text "can be protonated to form a water molecule" removed by this[2] edit? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 06:43, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

C(OH)₄ is hypothetical- the dissociation in water is therefore hypothetical- it can be envisaged- but a rewording and a reference are required. Silicic acid cannot be SiO₂(OH)₂, there is an ion [SiO₂(OH)₂]^2–, but that isn't quite the same thing. I think this is a misreading of the reference.Axiosaurus (talk) 14:59, 19 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The article refers to the "self-ionization reaction:

H⁺ + OH⁻ ⇌ H₂O,"

... but shouldn't it be written the other way? As in:

H₂O, ⇌ H⁺ + OH⁻

?

I'm not an expert in chemistry, so I don't want to make this change without consulting someone who knows better, but it seems to me like it should be written the second way for two reasons. First, I've always learned to write the equilibrium constant as the product of the concentrations of the "products" (i.e. molecules on the right side of the equation) divided by the product of the concentrations of the "reactants" (i.e. the molecules on the left side of the equation), substituting 1 for water or for solids, since there is always plenty of those. If we go by this rule, the equilibrium constant for the reaction as it is currently written would be K_w = 1/([H⁺][OH⁻][H⁺]), rather than [H⁺][OH⁻][H⁺]. Secondly, this is referred to as a self-ionization reaction, and even though the reaction can proceed both ways, we usually think of the "forward" direction as being from left to right, and the "reverse" direction as being from right to left. If we're calling it a self-ionization reaction, shouldn't the "forward" direction be the direction in which water actually ionizes itself, rather than un-ionizing itself?

75.118.5.222 (talk) 00:13, 5 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"The hypothetical compound C(OH)4 (orthocarbonic acid or methanetetrol) is unstable in aqueous solution:" Is it appropriate to use "is" when referring to a hypothetical compound? I would normally use "would be" in this context. The use of "is" implies, at least to me, that this instability has been observed, not merely predicted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chrisbaarry (talk • contribs) 12:28, 29 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This article has been badly hacked away from it's original state. The article does not fit the lucid form of element or compound articles found elsewhere in Wikipedia. Minor details of use are pasted into the summary and so on. Details are unordered, definitions are partial, details and words are given before defined. Absolutely detestable writing.

This article has been attacked. It was not this way last time I looked at it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8806:400:51F0:60EC:E90F:276E:96EC (talk) 23:28, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Bioxide. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 21:45, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]