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
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.
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