is the saltiness or dissolved salt content of a body of water.  The technical term for saltiness in the ocean is salinity, from the fact that halides—chloride specifically—are the most abundant anions in the mix of dissolved elements. In oceanography, it has been traditional to express salinity not as percent, but as parts per thousand (ppt or ‰), which is approximately grams of salt per liter of solution. In other disciplines chemical analyses of solutions, and thus salinity is frequently reported in mg/L or ppm (parts per million).