Is beating oxidised just gaining oxygen, because somewhere I read that HCL(hydrocolric acid) was oxidised to Cl2( chlorine) so is the text just misprinted or is there actually a reason behind it?
In: Chemistry
If you look at the Wikipedia entry of redox reactions, it discusses the origin of “oxidation.” Yes, initially it was used to described a reaction with oxygen forming an oxide, but later it was generalized to include chemically similar reactions even devoid of an oxygen reactant. In that sense, reduction is gaining an electron, and oxidation is losing one.
In chemistry, an element in a chemical reaction is oxidized when it loses electrons as a result of the chemical reaction. Search redox reactions for details.
Oxidation is electron loss; the opposite of that is reduction, which is electron gain. (Some people remember “LEO says GER”, which stands for Losing Electrons is Oxidation / Gaining Electrons is Reduction”.)
Just like in accounting where you should always have one account getting credited and another getting debited, because money is coming out of one place and going to another, electrochemical reactions always have one thing getting oxidized while another thing gets reduced.
We call electron loss ‘oxidation’ because oxygen is really good at ripping electrons off other things. When somebody takes your electrons, we could say “you got oxygened!” but instead we say “you got oxidized”.
In your example, hydrochloric acid solution contains Cl- ions (where each chlorine atom has a total of 18 electrons) and that gets converted to Cl2 (where each chlorine atom has 17 electrons). Each Cl has lost an electron, so we say chlorine got oxidized. It’s not easy to oxidize chlorides – Cl generally wins electron fights – but it can happen.
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