Like, if you look at the back of a shampoo bottle or something, there’s always a ridiculously long name for an ingredient.Are these sorts of ingredients able to be broken down into elements? Kind of like how dihydrogen monoxide is just the chemical name for water.
In: 4
Yes, kind of.
The shampoo ingredients are all organic molecules. This doesn’t mean they’re free-range happy molecules but it instead means that these are molecules – at least conceptually – based on carbon and hydrogen. Carbon, due to it’s very special quantum properties, makes a wealth of compounds greater than the number of compounds of all other elements combined. This literally infite amount of possible compounds needs to be named somehow which is why the [IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC_nomenclature_of_organic_chemistry) was invented.
You guessed correctly that the ridiculous names are assembled from building blocks. However, these building blocks aren’t individual atoms. Instead, they’re common and well-known groups of atoms called functional groups and/or fragments. The names according to the IUPAC system basically are an agreed-upon way of describing which fragments in which order and geometric orientation – at least conceptually – go together to make up the molecules of the substance at hand.
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