deliquescent
/ˌdɛlɪˈkwɛs(ə)nt/adjective
1Becoming liquid, or having a tendency to become liquid.Remember that there may technically be stronger drinks in the desert, but since ethanol is deliquescent, any such drinks would absorb water from the air to remain at most 96% by volume alcohol....
- Like bookends to the main event, he added orderly and totemic panels of more intimate scale, frosted over by a deliquescent rust applied like wash to gatherings of yet more lost things.
- That said, his third solo exhibition at Kasmin featured 10 roiling, deliquescent abstractions that refer less to nature than to the mediated status of its representation.
1.1 Chemistry (Of a solid) tending to absorb moisture from the air and dissolve in it.Potassium carbonate is deliquescent, which means that it will absorb water from the air....
- The aqueous-phase chemistry of deliquescent sea-salt aerosols in the remote marine boundary layer is investigated with a steady state box model.
- The number of particles is independent of the deliquescent state at which they are measured.
Derivatives
deliquescence
/ noun ...- He had slushy ferric salts succumbing to their own deliquescence.
- An extended communal deliquescence into the same subway sludge from which the torment arose.
- Aids may not have specific symptoms, but Ebola most certainly does - a short incubation period followed by massive collapse and eventual deliquescence of the internal organs.
Origin
Late 18th century: from Latin deliquescent- 'dissolving', from the verb deliquescere (see deliquesce).