Bonding
10 questions tagged Bonding — spanning every one of the seven Ws.
What is electronegativity?
Electronegativity is an atom’s tendency to attract shared electrons in a chemical bond. Fluorine is the most electronegative element.
What is a covalent bond?
A covalent bond is a chemical bond where atoms share one or more pairs of electrons. It is common between nonmetals.
What is an ionic bond?
An ionic bond is the attraction between oppositely charged ions. It usually forms when one atom transfers electrons to another.
Whose work explained the shape of the electron cloud in chemical bonds?
Linus Pauling transformed chemical bonding with valence bond theory in the 1930s. His work helped explain molecular shapes, bond angles and electronegativity.
What is a metal bond?
A metallic bond is the force that holds metal atoms together through a shared “sea” of mobile electrons. This gives metals their conductivity and malleability.
What is the octet rule?
The octet rule is the idea that many atoms are most stable when they have eight electrons in their outer shell. It helps explain common bonding patterns in main-group chemistry.
What is a coordinate covalent bond?
A coordinate covalent bond is a covalent bond in which both shared electrons come from the same atom. It is also called a dative bond.
Whose work explained chemical bonding with shared electron pairs?
Gilbert N. Lewis’s. In 1916 he proposed the shared-electron covalent bond and Lewis dot structures.
Whose work gave us the concept of the valence of an element?
Edward Frankland’s. In the 1850s he introduced valence, the combining power of atoms.
What is a metallic bond?
A metallic bond is the attraction between metal ions and a sea of shared, mobile electrons. It explains why metals conduct electricity and can be hammered into shape.