mercuric
adjective
mercuric is an adjective meaning “Specifically (of a compound), containing mercury with an oxidation number of 2” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled M-E-R-C-U-R-I-C and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 19 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does mercuric mean?
adjective
- 1
obsoletePertaining to or derived from mercury.
- 2
Specifically (of a compound), containing mercury with an oxidation number of 2.
- 3
rareMercurial (of people).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce mercuric?
- US
Mercuric has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Flame,_not_lame-mercuric.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
How common is mercuric?
Mercuric appears about once in every 19 million words in written English, the 131,834th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Mercuric in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense containing mercury with an oxidation number of 2:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does mercuric come from?
From mercury + -ic, partly after French mercurique.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).