salt
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Salt is a chemical compound made up of positively and negatively charged particles bonded together, with table salt being the most familiar example. It matters because salt is essential for human health, food preservation, and countless industrial processes.
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The crystal structure of sodium chloride, NaCl, a typical salt. The purple spheres represent sodium cations, Na, and the green spheres represent chloride anions, Cl. The yellow stipples show the electrostatic forces.
In chemistry, a salt or ionic compound is a chemical compound consisting of an assembly of positively charged ions (cations) and negatively charged ions (anions), which results in a compound with no net electric charge. The constituent ions are held together by electrostatic forces termed ionic bonds.