Hydrochloric acid, also known as muriatic acid, is an aqueous solution of hydrogen chloride. It is a colorless solution with a distinctive pungent smell. It is classified as a strong acid. It is a component of the gastric acid in the digestive systems of most animal species, including humans. Hydrochloric acid is an important laboratory reagent and industrial chemical.

Hydrochloric acid is usually prepared industrially by dissolving hydrogen chloride in water. Hydrogen chloride can be generated in many ways, and thus several precursors to hydrochloric acid exist. The large-scale production of hydrochloric acid is almost always integrated with the industrial scale production of other chemicals, such as in the chloralkali process which produces hydroxide, hydrogen, and chlorine, the latter of which can be combined to produce HCl.^[29][30]

Hydrogen chloride is produced by combining chlorine and hydrogen:

Cl₂ + H₂ → 2 HCl

As the reaction is exothermic, the installation is called an HCl oven or HCl burner. The resulting hydrogen chloride gas is absorbed in deionized water, resulting in chemically pure hydrochloric acid. This reaction can give a very pure product, e.g. for use in the food industry.

Hydrochloric acid is a strong inorganic acid that is used in many industrial processes such as refining metal. The application often determines the required product quality.^[23] Hydrogen chloride, not hydrochloric acid, is used more widely in industrial organic chemistry, e.g. for vinyl chloride and dichloroethane.