Chemical Name Calculator

A chemical formula is a compressed structural statement, and translating it into a name follows different rules depending on how the compound is bonded. Binary ionic compounds are named cation first, anion second with an -ide ending, so NaCl becomes sodium chloride. When a metal has more than one common oxidation state, Stock notation adds a Roman numeral, which is why Fe2O3 is iron(III) oxide rather than simply iron oxide. Binary molecular compounds instead take Greek multiplying prefixes on both elements, giving carbon dioxide for CO2 and dinitrogen pentoxide for N2O5, with mono- normally dropped from the first element. Polyatomic ions keep fixed names such as sulfate, nitrate, carbonate and permanganate, so KMnO4 is potassium permanganate. The molar mass is the sum of the standard atomic weights of every atom in the formula, taken from the IUPAC Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights. Water works out to 2 x 1.008 plus 15.999, or 18.015 g/mol; sulfuric acid to 98.079 g/mol. Dividing a sample mass by molar mass gives amount of substance in moles, and multiplying by the Avogadro constant, fixed at 6.02214076 x 10^23 per mole since the 2019 SI revision, gives the particle count. Dividing moles by molar concentration returns the solution volume needed. Two limitations matter: formulas are case sensitive, since CO is carbon monoxide while Co is cobalt, and an empirical formula such as CH2O does not identify a compound uniquely because glucose, C6H12O6, shares it. Hydrates such as CuSO4 5H2O also require the water of crystallisation to be counted in the molar mass.

Systematic chemical naming began in 1787, when Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude Louis Berthollet and Antoine Francois de Fourcroy published the Methode de nomenclature chimique in Paris. It replaced names such as oil of vitriol and flowers of zinc with composition-based terms built from the elements present, and it introduced the -ate and -ite endings for oxyacid salts that are still used. Jons Jacob Berzelius supplied the other half of the system in 1813 by proposing one- and two-letter element symbols drawn from Latin names, which made a written formula a direct statement of composition. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, founded in 1919, took responsibility for standardising the naming rules, publishing them in the volume known as the Red Book, Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, whose current recommendations date from 2005. Alfred Stock proposed the Roman numeral convention for variable-valence metals in 1919, gradually displacing the older -ous and -ic suffixes such as ferrous and ferric. Molar mass calculations rest on a separate line of work: atomic weights refined through the nineteenth century by Berzelius and later by Theodore William Richards, whose precise determinations won the 1914 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the mole itself, adopted as an SI base unit in 1971 and redefined in 2019 by fixing the Avogadro constant to an exact value.