Brief Outline of the History of Chemical Nomenclature

Abstract

Chemical terminology and nomenclature form an important part of chemistry. Apart from verbal terms, the important and inseparable part of nomenclature consists of symbols – logograms. They substitute names of elements and compounds and in modern nomenclatures represent their atomic or molecular weights. Old nomenclatures, first of all the alchemic one, were greatly redundant and unsystematic and used many non-compatible logograms. The first systematic nomenclature, completed by the logogram system, was created by de Morveau, Lavoisier, Berthollet, and Fourcroy (1787). The system of plausible alphabetic logograms was introduced by Berzelius (1812). The first Czech systemic nomenclature was created by Presl (1828) using only five valency suffixes; the improved nomenclature by Šafařík (1860) expressed all oxidation numbers by the word suffixes. The modern Czech chemical nomenclature tends to accept most IUPAC recommendations.