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 :).
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