Honors Chemistry Name: Connor Sapien

Skills Review Date: 2-28-18

Part 1
Determining Chemical Formulas of Ionic Compounds:
Naming and Writing Binary Ionic Compounds of Type I
Cations
 Binary compounds contain only two different
elements. The names of binary ionic compounds take
the following form:
 The charges of the representative elements can be
predicted from the last digit of their group
number.

 The representative elements form only one type of

charge.

 Charges between the cation (+) and anion (-) must

be balanced and can be done so easily by “criss
crossing” the charges and bringing them down as subscripts.

KCl is potassium chloride.

CaO is calcium oxide

Naming and Writing Type II Ionic Compounds:

 The second type of ionic compound contains a metal that
can form more than one kind of cation, depending on the
compound, bonded to a nonmetal anion.

 The metal’s charge must be specified for a given

compound.

 Transition metals tend to form multiple types of charges.

Hence, their charges cannot be predicted as in the case of
most representative elements.

 The full name of compounds containing metals that form

more than one kind of cation have the following form:
Determining Chemical Formulas and Names of Molecular (Covalent) Compounds:
 Molecular compounds are composed of two or more nonmetals.
 Generally, write the name of the element with the smallest group number first.
 If the two elements lie in the same group, then write the element with the lower
electronegativity (or greatest period number) first.
 The prefixes given to each element indicate the number of atoms present.

 These prefixes are the same as those used in naming hydrates:

mono = 1 hexa = 6
di = 2 hepta = 7
tri = 3 octa = 8
tetra = 4 nona = 9
penta = 5 deca = 10

*If there is only one atom of the first element in the formula, the prefix mono- is
normally omitted.

Note: when the addition of the Greek prefix places two vowels adjacent
to one another, the "a" (or the "o") at the end of the Greek prefix is
usually dropped; e.g., "nonaoxide" would be written as "nonoxide",
and "monooxide" would be written as "monoxide". The "i" at the end
of the prefixes "di-" and "tri-" are never dropped.

Examples:
dinitrogen trioxide N2O3 silicon dioxide

nitrogen N2 nickel (III) sulfide

lithium fluoride LiF manganese (II) phosphate

phosphorus trifluoride PF3 diboron tetrabromide

vanadium(V) oxide V2O5 potassium carbonate

magnesium chloride MgCl2 calcium oxide