Chapter 5

Relating chemical names to structure

Your newly acquired knowledge of bonding can immediately be put to work in understanding the rationale behind systematic chemical names. The major sub-classification is between inorganic materials and organic ones and this chapter aims to show the basis of naming for a reasonable range of each. It cannot be complete but will show you which names for materials have meaning. The chapter includes older naming systems for chemicals. This is not a recommendation to use older names or trivial names, but it might be a useful reference and an aid to understanding older treatment reports, and even more so, historic literature on industrial and manufacturing processes for many materials ranging from pigments and dyes to industrial products.

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