Chemical Nomenclature

These pages are a guide to naming most ionic and covalently bonded substances encountered in introductory level chemistry courses. Naming of organic substances is not covered in this section. Some basic organic nomenclature can be found in the Qualitative Analysis of Functional Groups experiment.

The flowchart on these pages contains a series of questions that can be used to help determine the correct name of a compound from its chemical formula. For some of the questions there is information at the bottom of the page to help guide you.

It will be helpful to view the whole flowchart before beginning this activity.

If you would like additional practice, try these.

You should also be able to work backwards. In other words, given a name, write the formula. If you want to make sure you can, try these.