Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
Chemistry Nomenclature help?
how come some compounds have prefixes like: di, tri, petra, etc. but other times you don't use these prefixes?
Another question is in this ionic compound: KClO4. How come the name of the compound is Potassium Perchlorate and not Potassium Chlorate?
2 Answers
- 9 years agoFavorite Answer
only covalent compounds use the prefixes, ionic ones don't.
it's potassium perchlorate because the perchlorate ion is ClO4 - and the chlorate ion is only ClO3 -
- steve_geo1Lv 79 years ago
There is a limited number of chlorine oxy salts. So there is agreement that KClO = potassium hypochlorite, KClO2 = potassium chlorite, KClO3 = potassium chlorate, and KClO4 = potassium perchlorate.
Among the nitrogen oxides, N2O is commonly called nitrous oxide. NO is nitric oxide. When we get to NO2, that is nitrogen dioxide, which dimerizes at cold temperatures to N2O4, which is dinitrogen tetroxide. Then there are N2O3 and N2O5.
There should be order and logic in chemical names, but sometimes there are not. So learn the material now, confident that you will be able to make sense of it later.
