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I'm an H⁺ denier, in that I refuse to consider loose protons to be real hydrogen, so I personally believe it stands for 'pretend'.
They told me at school that ‘p’ meant ‘negative log’. So ‘pH’ means ‘the negative log of the concentration of Hydrogen ions in moles/litre’.
pH 1 is 1 x 10^-1^ (strong acid)
pH 7 is 1 x 10^-7^ (neutral)
pH 14 is 1 x 10^-14^ (alkaline)
(Chemistry was a long time ago, though)
The xkcd breaks it down for us, basically we don't know because the person who coined the term never specified what it was. It's either: puissance, potens, or potenz. Which means potency in French, ~~Dutch~~ Danish and German, the three languages the scientists published in.
Can the term potency also be used to refer to the exponent in English? Because that is what is meant by the terms in the other languages and I haven't come across that usage of the word potency in English