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
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.
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