'salt-tolerance' originates from Modern English as a compound of the words 'salt' and 'tolerance', where 'salt' meant 'salt' and 'tolerance' meant 'the capacity to endure or bear.'

'tolerance' comes from Latin 'tolerantia' (from 'tolerare' meaning 'to endure'), passed into Old French and then Middle English as 'tolerance'; 'salt' comes from Old English 'sālt', from Proto-Germanic '*saltą' (ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root '*sal-' meaning 'salt'). These elements combined in Modern English to form the compound 'salt-tolerance'.

Initially, the component 'tolerance' meant 'the capacity to endure' and 'salt' simply meant 'salt'; over time the compound came to specifically mean 'the capacity to endure saline conditions', a more specialized ecological/physiological sense.