naming chemical compounds.

Question

I don't really get how you get the symbol from the word or the other way around for polyotomic ions

so.. here are some examples that a website gave me:

this is wut the site said to do:(Its confusing to me)

The name of the compound should have a roman numeral placed between the name of the cation and the anion to indicate the specific charge of the cation being used.  To determine this charge you need to determine what charge is needed to balance the overall compound.  To do this multiply the charge of the anion by the number of anions divide this by the number of cations.  This will give the charge for the cation.

Examples:

FeO - iron II Oxide PbO - lead II oxide

Fe2O3 - iron III oxide PbO2 - lead IV oxide

CuOH - copper I hydroxide CrNO3 - chromium II nitrate

Cu(OH)2 - copper II hydroxide CrNO2 - chromium II nitrite

so basically im wondering how they got from the symbols to the names

Thanks:)

claire · Answer

oh i got it!! nevermind.

DrBob222 · Answer

The periodic table is made up of a bunch of elements (something like 116 or so and still rising) BUT each has a name AND a symbol. The simple way of answering that part of your question is to say memorize them. That isn't that hard to do but usually we don't need to know all of them; just the common ones. MOST of them use the beginning letter for symbols. For example:
B is boron.
C is carbon.
N is nitrogen.
O is oxygen.
F is fluorine.
H is hydrogen.
BUT since there are many elements that begin with the same letter, that system goes awry; therefore, some elements must have the first two letters or at least the first and another letter.
So B is boron and Be is beryllium, Ba is barium.
C is carbon so Ca is calcium, Cr is chromium, Cd is cadmium, etc.
H is hydrogen so He is helium, and Ho is holmium.
Then there are the funny ones like you posted.
There are a number of elements that were known in the dark ages and those elements were named by Greeks/Italians/Germans/ you get the picture.
Cu is copper (from cuprum--latin)
Fe is iron (from ferrum)
Hg is mercury (from hydragynum)
Ag is silver (from argentum)
Pb is lead (from plumbum)
Sn is tin (from stannum).
W is tungsten (W for wolfram from German --In fact the IUPAC insists wolfram is the correct name (or at least did) but the U. S. said we would go along with the symbol of W (to make it internationally accepted ) but we still would call it tunsten).
K is potassium (from the German word Kalium).

I hope I've answered part of your question. If I didn't get to everything please post again.Thanks.