Acetate
salt or ester of acetic acid
An acetate is a salt formed by the combination of acetic acid with a base (e.g. alkaline, earthy, metallic, nonmetallic, or radical base). "Acetate" also describes the conjugate base or ion (specifically, the negatively charged ion called an anion) typically found in aqueous solution and written with the chemical formula C2H3O−2. The neutral molecules formed by the combination of the acetate ion and a positive ion (called a cation) are also commonly called "acetates" (hence, acetate of lead, acetate of aluminium, etc.). The simplest of these is hydrogen acetate (called acetic acid) with corresponding salts, esters, and the polyatomic anion CH3CO−2, or CH3COO−.
Most of the approximately 5 million tonnes of acetic acid produced annually in industry are used in the production of acetates, which usually take the form of polymers. In nature, acetate is the most common building block for biosynthesis.
Nomenclature and common formula
When part of a salt, the formula of the acetate ion is written as CH3CO−2, C2H3O−2, or CH3COO−. Chemists often represent acetate as OAc− or, less commonly, AcO−. Thus, HOAc is the symbol for acetic acid, NaOAc for sodium acetate, and EtOAc for ethyl acetate (as Ac is common symbol for acetyl group CH3CO).
“Acetate” enters the record as salt or ester of acetic acid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Acetate, salt and ester can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q212527. The Library of Congress control number is sh85000457. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Acetate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.