When referring to a salt, chemists usually mean something other than the seasoning, or sodium chloride (NaCl). In chemical terms, a salt is a compound that is the result of a reaction between a base and an acid, or neutralization. For example, NaCl can be formed by the reaction of hydrochloric acid (HCl) with sodium hydroxide (NaOH). Salts are composed of ions rather than molecules, so the chemical symbol for a salt indicates the proportion of the elements that compose it (e.g., the symbol NaCl shows that table salt is made up of equal numbers of sodium and chloride ions). All salts are ionic compounds which contain the cation of a base, other than OH^- or O₂^-, and the anion of an acid, other than H⁺.

One of the identifying characteristics of most salts is that they have an ionic lattice (a regular arrangement of...