What is "sodium borohydride"

n. (context chemistry English) A hydrido complex, NaBH₄; it is a selective reducing agent used in many industrial applications.

Sodium borohydride, also known as sodium tetrahydridoborate, and sodium tetrahydroborate is an inorganic compound with the formula Na BH. This white solid, usually encountered as a powder, is a versatile reducing agent that finds wide application in chemistry, both in the laboratory and on a technical scale. It has been tested as pretreatment for pulping of wood, but is too costly to be commercialized. The compound is soluble in alcohols and certain ethers but reacts with water in the absence of a base.

The compound was discovered in the 1940s by H. I. Schlesinger, who led a team that developed metal borohydrides for wartime applications (in particular, looking for a uranium compound more volatile than the hexafluoride to be used in isotope separation by gaseous diffusion; this line of research did not yield useful results). Their work was declassified and published only in 1953.