Why are alkaline solutions called “bases”? What’s “basic” about them?
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I think this is more of a language question rather than chemical – as far as I understand it it has nothing to do with the casual use of the word “basic”.
The term “base” was coined for these chemicals by Chemists like Georg Ernst Stahl, Robert Boyle und Guillaume François Rouelle, because they used these nonvolatile things to “fix” volatile acids and stop them from being corrosive. They didn’t understand the mechanism behind it yet, they imagined it works like putting the instable acid on a solid base so it stays stable.
The language is funny and historical so forget about it.
They should probably be called a “negative acid” or something.
They’re fundamentally (colloquially) just the “opposite” of acids in that they corrode things by having extra electrons (acids corrode things by stealing electrons) – this is a very rough and colloquial description but I think it’s good enough to discuss at a simple level.
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