Meaning and example

a chemical reaction in which an ester is heated with an alkali (especially the alkaline hydrolysis of a fat or oil to make soap)

The passage used "saponification" to mean a chemical reaction in which an ester is heated with an alkali (especially the alkaline hydrolysis of a fat or oil to make soap).

Plain-English interpretation

A prevalence score of -0.300 places saponification in the very rare range on this site. In practical terms, the word was recognized by about 38.1% of people in the source dataset.

Related words

No indexed related-word pages are available for this entry yet.

Source attribution

Brysbaert, M., Mandera, P., McCormick, S. F., & Keuleers, E. (2019). Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 51, 467-479.

Definitions and related terms are derived from WordNet. This page is part of the curated indexable word set.