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Wow wikipedia is so hard
>The concept of pH was first introduced by the Danish chemist Soren Peder Lauritz Sorensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1909[4] and revised to the modern pH in 1924 to accommodate definitions and measurements in terms of electrochemical cells. In the first papers, the notation had the "H" as a subscript to the lowercase "p", as so: pH.
>The exact meaning of the "p" in "pH" is disputed, as Sorensen did not explain why he used it.[5] He describes a way of measuring it using potential differences, and it represents the negative power of 10 in the concentration of hydrogen ions. All the words for these start with p in French, German and Danish, all languages Sorensen published in: Carlsberg Laboratory was French-speaking, German was the dominant language of scientific publishing, and Sorensen was Danish. He also used "q" in much the same way elsewhere in the paper. So the "p" could stand for the French puissance, German Potenz, or Danish potens, meaning "power", or it could mean "potential". He might also just have labelled the test solution "p" and the reference solution "q" arbitrarily; these letters are often paired.[6] There is little to support the suggestion that "pH" stands for the Latin terms pondus hydrogenii (quantity of hydrogen) or potentia hydrogenii (power of hydrogen).
>Currently in chemistry, the p stands for "decimal cologarithm of", and is also used in the term pKa, used for acid dissociation constants[7] and pOH, the equivalent for hydroxide ions.
