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Chemical symbols are the abbreviations used in chemistry, mainly for chemical elements; but also for functional groups, chemical compounds, and other entities. Element symbols for chemical elements, also known as atomic symbols , normally consist of one or two letters from the Latin alphabet and are written with the first letter capitalised.
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
The chemical elements are what the periodic table classifies and organizes. Hydrogen is the element with atomic number 1; helium, atomic number 2; lithium, atomic number 3; and so on. Each of these names can be further abbreviated by a one- or two-letter chemical symbol; those for hydrogen, helium, and lithium are respectively H, He, and Li. [6]
An example is the condensed molecular/chemical formula for ethanol, which is CH 3 −CH 2 −OH or CH 3 CH 2 OH. However, even a condensed chemical formula is necessarily limited in its ability to show complex bonding relationships between atoms, especially atoms that have bonds to four or more different substituents.
A chemical element is a chemical substance whose atoms all have the same number of protons. The number of protons is called the atomic number of that element. For example, oxygen has an atomic number of 8, meaning each oxygen atom has 8 protons in its nucleus.
Alchemical symbols were used to denote chemical elements and compounds, ... The following example can be found in Pernety's Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique (1758): [8]
The first letter is always capitalized. While the symbol is often a contraction of the element's name, it may sometimes not match the element's English name; for example, "Pb" for lead (from Latin plumbum) or "W" for tungsten (from German Wolfram). Elements which have only temporary systematic names are given temporary three-letter symbols (e.g ...
Hazard symbols; List of mathematical constants (typically letters and compound symbols) Glossary of mathematical symbols; List of physical constants (typically letters and compound symbols) List of common physics notations (typically letters used as variable names in equations) Rod of Asclepius / Caduceus as a symbol of medicine