New York Times Crossword: Is "electrically balanced" in chemistry "apolar" (given), "neutral," or something else entirely?
Apolar is certainly a valid alternative to non-polar.
Either is natural in English as it is for, e.g. &quot;asymptomatic&quot;, or its use in chemistry for non-polar has been introduced by non native English speakers quickly translating in their works basically the same word, &quot;apolaire&quot; in French and &quot;apolare&quot; in Italian, for instance.
Let me skip this discussion as matter for another SE site.
However, a quick Google chemical oriented search showed me that apolar is less diffused than what I expected, and seems to be more recurrent in biochemistry and astrochemistry, or as suggested in a comment, computational chemistry.
For the point more relevant to Chemistry SE,
&quot;1) Is &quot;apolar&quot; an accepted or commonly-used word in chemistry as 2) a synonym for &quot;electrically neutral,&quot; and if so, in what context has this appeared?&quot;
For 1) see above. For 2) the answer is NOT. It just means, closer to the general definition that OP has found and reported, that a chemical entity has not (electrical) poles, i.e. no excess or partial electrical charges are present over its part.
While speaking of bonds, or simple biatomic molecules, apolar and non polar means that negligible or no electrical dipole moment is present. Still, an ensemble of polar bonds can nevertheless lead, as per vectors summation, to an apolar, or non-polar if you prefere, molecule.
While apolar chemical entities are indeed neutral, the same can be true for very polar uncharged molecules.
Another use of the terms is to classify solvents. In this case partial or overall electrical dipole moments are just one of the many factors influencing the interaction between molecules of different solvents or between them and those of a solute. The interested reader can refer to the section &quot;Other polarity scales&quot; of this Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvent for more details.
(In the context of the puzzle, the given word definition is somewhat acceptable, because an apolar molecule won't present much of charge whatever finely examined, unless one discerns electrons and nuclei. And the fact that - as for the title rather than the OP text - they gave a somehow vague &quot;electrically balanced&quot; description, makes it quite accurate for apolar, in a crossword.)