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In elementary chemistry courses, the lone pairs of water are described as "rabbit ears": two equivalent electron pairs of approximately sp 3 hybridization, while the HOH bond angle is 104.5°, slightly smaller than the ideal tetrahedral angle of arccos(–1/3) ≈ 109.47°.
AX 2 E 1 molecules, such as SnCl 2, have only one lone pair and the central angle about 120° (the centre and two vertices of an equilateral triangle). They have three sp 2 orbitals. There exist also sd-hybridised AX 2 compounds of transition metals without lone pairs: they have the central angle about 90° and are also classified as bent.
Consequently, the bond angles are set at 120°. For example, boron trifluoride. Angular: Angular molecules (also called bent or V-shaped) have a non-linear shape. For example, water (H 2 O), which has an angle of about 105°. A water molecule has two pairs of bonded electrons and two unshared lone pairs.
The difference between lone pairs and bonding pairs may also be used to rationalize deviations from idealized geometries. For example, the H 2 O molecule has four electron pairs in its valence shell: two lone pairs and two bond pairs. The four electron pairs are spread so as to point roughly towards the apices of a tetrahedron.
2: Bond angle(s) 180° ... linear geometry occurs at central atoms with two bonded atoms and zero or three lone pairs (AX 2 or AX 2 E 3) in the AXE notation.
As such, the predicted shape and bond angle of sp 3 hybridization is tetrahedral and 109.5°. This is in open agreement with the true bond angle of 104.45°. The difference between the predicted bond angle and the measured bond angle is traditionally explained by the electron repulsion of the two lone pairs occupying two sp 3 hybridized orbitals.
The seesaw geometry occurs when a molecule has a steric number of 5, with the central atom being bonded to 4 other atoms and 1 lone pair (AX 4 E 1 in AXE notation). An atom bonded to 5 other atoms (and no lone pairs) forms a trigonal bipyramid with two axial and three equatorial positions, but in the seesaw geometry one of the atoms is replaced ...
This increased p character in those orbitals decreases the bond angle between them to less than the tetrahedral 109.5°. The same logic can be applied to ammonia (107.0° HNH bond angle, with three N(~sp 3.4 or 23% s) bonding orbitals and one N(~sp 2.1 or 32% s) lone pair), the other canonical example of this phenomenon.