Will vinegar and salt make hydrochloric acid?

The question came up in this thread. Posting it here to avoid derailing it further.

Will salt and vinegar make HCl? Any at all? I don’t think so but I’m a chemistry dunce.

If you’re talking aqueous solutions, not in any meaningful sense. Hydrochloric acid is a “strong acid”, meaning it dissociates nearly completely in water (it’s probably literally unmeasurable how much does not dissociate). You have acetic acid, which has a certain pH (concentration of hydronium ions), and adding salt’s not going to change it: the chloride is unreactive with the acetic acid under these conditions.

It’s the “strong acid” aspect that makes hydrochloric acid a pretty good cleaner or a lot of things, but it means you’re not going to do diddly squat by adding just the anion.

If you wanted to get creative, I bet you could take glacial (100%) acetic acid, drop in some salt, probably heat it, and maybe drive off some hydrogen chloride as gas (taking advantage of the differences in boiling points). The more usual way to generate hydrogen chloride gas on a lab scale (other than buying it) would be to drop either concentrated aqueous hydrochloric acid, or else concentrated sulfuric acid onto salt.

Incidentally, adding a conjugate anion of an acid to a solution tends to make it less acidic, not more. The conjugate anion of an acid is itself a base. In the case of chloride, an extremely weak base, so it won’t do anything. If you added, say, sodium acetate, you would make the solution less acidic (higher pH)

I don’t think so, not in significant amounts, anyway. Acetic acid is a far weaker acid than hydrochloric, and just does not release all that many hydrogen ions in solution.

ETA: Ninjaed!

if you want to make Hydrochloric acid from common salt, you will need concentrated sulfuric acid and need to heat up the mixture.

Mixing aqueous solutions of NaCl and HOAc would be like adding NaOAc, a base, to HCl. Acetate is a much stronger base than chloride.

Changing ionic strength (e.g. by adding NaCl) will change chemical activities, which will change the pH, which is why Henderson–Hasselbalch never works right.