Why is the chemical name for the combination of Nitrogen and Oxygen Nitric Oxide (NO) and not Oxide Nitric (ON)?
Is there a rule as to why the N in nitrogen comes before the O in oxygen when writing it’s chemical name?
I hope this makes sense…
In: Chemistry
THere are conventions for naming chemicals (IUPAC). More speciffcally, an oxide is a type of product, a *suffix* or noun if you will. The nitric is like an adjective, it describes what type of oxide i.e. an oxide of nitrogen.
Imagine you have a stand that sells different types of Fries. Normal fries and cheese fries. The “fries” denotes the product, the “cheese” denotes the type of product more specifically. You wouldn’t describe them as “Fries Cheese”, that’s just nonsensical. Similar energy here. This is a English language convention, and I understand it may be different in other languages which may swap the nouns/adjectives etc. Obviously there is more detail to this but this is the ELI5 version :).
For inorganic compounds (things which don’t have carbon chains) we name them after the positive ion (here Nitrogen) and follow that with the name of the negative ion (here Oxygen) with the suffix -ide.
Oxygen is not the positive ion in that (or any other that I’m aware of) compound so its name does not come first.
Once we have the order, we can modify the words to indicate things like ‘how many Oxygen ions there are’ or ‘how many Nitrogen ions there are’. Nowadays we do that with prefixes like “di-” or “tri-” hence things like:
> carbon dioxide – carbon (postivie ion) di (two) ox (oxygen) ide (negative ion) – positive carbon with two negative oxygens
Some compounds follow the older method as with “nitric” vs “nitrous” where there is a heirarchy of suffixes which indicate the oxidation state of the element. So nitr*ic* oxide has one N (NO) but nitr*ous* oxide has two (N2O), as “ous” indicates something which is less oxidised than “ic”.
It might be more technically correct to refer to nitrous oxide as “dinitrogen oxide” but the traditional name is so well known and established that it’s very hard to get rid of.
Yes, there are rules based on the reaction, which one is doing the oxidising.
In the case of nitrogen and oxygen, oxygen is the more reactive of the two and so is “responsible” for the reaction occuring, it oxidises nitrogen, not the other way around.
The same would go for fluorine, where it’d be a fluoride. And apparently ammonia (nitrogen and hydrogen) is a hydride.
But in basically all other cases you have other molecules where nitrogen is doing the oxidising, in which case they’re called nitrides.
It’s like alphabetical order in the periodic table. Nitrogen (N) comes before Oxygen (O), hence Nitric Oxide (NO) rather than Oxide Nitric (ON).
The N in Nitrogen gets dibs on the front spot simply because it was the one to say “NO” first.
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