PREVIOUSLY: « Avian Influenza Lottery  Black Eyed Peas – Big Hit in Nanotech »


The Chemical Name Game

Posted in Chemistry at 8:14 pm by David Bradley -- 4 Comments; add your comment

Working chemists would much prefer to be left to their own devices to come up with names for the compounds they discover. Names that trip off the tongue, names that twist it. Names that honour colleagues, the famous, home towns and occasionally slime moulds are all much nicer than sticking to the rules. So what’s in a name? as the man asked, and why shouldn’t we keep it trivial?

Read my cynical take on all that is systematic and all that is trivial in the world of chemical nomenclature

4 Responses to “The Chemical Name Game”

  1. 4
    David Bradley Says:

    naeem, do you mean azodicarbonamide, I guess that would be diazene-1,2-dicarboxamide.

    InChI=1/C2H4N4O2/c3-1(7)5-6-2(4)8/h(H2,3,7)(H2,4,8)/f/h3-4H2

  2. 3
    naeem Says:

    what is the chemical name of AZODICARBONIMADE

  3. 2
    sciencebase Says:

    It can indeed, I wrote that piece at a time when I had a stack of names to produce to deadline and was feeling less than benevolent towards any and all nomenclature systems. Paul May’s Silly Molecules site is a great chemical diversion and I have mentioned it several times in the past in the likes of New Scientist and, of course, on Sciencebase.

  4. 1
    Jean-Claude Bradley Says:

    Chemistry nomenclature can actually be piles of fun – see this site
    http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm

Leave a Reply