Word.ws English Dictionary

phosphates

phosphates is the plural of phosphate.

phosphates is the third-person singular simple present indicative of phosphate.

Meaning of phosphate

Noun

phosphate (countable and uncountable, plural phosphates)

  1. Any salt or ester of phosphoric acid.
    • Make sure you don’t use detergents with phosphates or nonylphenol ethoxylate surfactants, but that information is rarely available on the labels.2009 February 26, Julie Scelfo, “When It Comes to Detergents, What’s the Least Irresponsible Choice?”, in The New York Times
  2. Any fertiliser containing phosphate compounds.
  3. Guano (containing high levels of phosphates and harvested for the fertiliser industry).
  4. (US, dated, regional) A carbonated soft drink containing phosphoric acid, often flavored with a fruit-based syrup.
    • An egg phosphate is a phosphate to which an egg has been added in the proper manner. While an egg phosphate can be flavored with any syrup that makes a good phosphate, still the standard flavor by long usage has com to be orange […]1920, Irving P. Fox, The Spatula, page 27

See all 5 meanings of phosphate

Phrases with phosphates

Questions about phosphates

What is phosphates the plural of?
Phosphates is the plural of phosphate.

Words near phosphates in the dictionary

  1. phosphate acetyltransferase
  2. phosphate butyryltransferase
  3. phosphated
  4. phosphated distarch phosphate
  5. phosphatemia
  6. phosphates
  7. phosphatese
  8. phosphatian
  9. phosphatic
  10. phosphatic diathesis
  11. phosphatically

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phosphates (page history and authors); phosphate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “phosphates.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/phosphates. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.