acid

acid fruits or liquors

Sour, sharp, or biting to the taste; tart; having the taste of vinegar.

His response was harsh and acid.

His voice was as stern and his face as acid as ever.

1864, Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, 2nd edition, volume 2, Smith, Elder & Co., page 235:

It must be admitted that Challenger is provocative in the last degree, but Summerlee has an acid tongue, which makes matters worse.

1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:

Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy—[…]—distilling therefrom an acid envy that robbed her napoleon of all its flavor.

1914 November, Louis Joseph Vance, “An Outsider […]”, in Munsey’s Magazine, volume LIII, number II, New York, N.Y.: The Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Company, […], published 1915, →OCLC, chapter I (Anarchy), page 373, column 2:

acid soils

Like other nyssas, it is in nature a creature of swampy places and looks loveliest where massed close to water and reflected in it, but justifies itself elsewhere if the soil is moist and acid, succeeding in wet clay.

1975, Peter N. Barber, Cecil Ernest Lucas Phillips, The Trees Around Us, page 101:

(music) Denoting a musical genre that is a distortion (as if hallucinogenic) of an existing genre, as in acid house, acid jazz, acid rock.

en-adj

acid (comparative acider, superlative acidest)

acider (comparative)
acidest (superlative)

From French acide, from Latin acidus (“sour, acid”), from aceō (“I am sour”). Doublet of agita.


acid

SE onset depends on a complex network of interactions among plant growth regulators, mainly auxins and cytokinins, during the proembryogenic early stages, and ethylene and gibberellic and abscisic acids later in the development of somatic embryos.

2015 August 18, Clelia De-la-Peña et al., “The role of chromatin modifications in somatic embryogenesis in plants”, in Frontiers in Plant Science, volume 6, →DOI:

Any compound which yields H+ ions (protons) when dissolved in water; an Arrhenius acid.

Any compound that easily donates protons to a base; a Brønsted acid.

Any compound that can accept a pair of electrons to form a covalent bond; a Lewis acid.

You are in error. / This is terror. / This is your banishment. This land is mine. / This is what you earn. / This is the Law of No Return. / This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine. / This is my history, this my race / And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.

In the end, though, there is one sure way to distinguish a real hippie from his assorted sympathizers: hippies drop acid. That is, real hippies frequently, if irregularly, ingest LSD.

1967, Joe David Brown, editor, The Hippies, New York: Time, Inc, page 171:

lysergic acid diethylamide
lysergic acid diethylamide

(uncountable, slang) LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.

en-noun

acid (countable and uncountable, plural acids)

→ Welsh: asid