Many chemicals are so much a part of our life that we know them by their familiar names, just like our other friends. About 15,000 new numbers are issued every day. For example, caffeine is uniquely identified by the registry number 58-08-2. But in order to make indexing and identification easier, every known chemical substance has its own numeric "personal ID", known as a CAS registry number. The rules for these names are defined by an international body. These are called systematic names they may be a bit ponderous, but they uniquely identify a given substance. Who thinks up the names for all these chemicals? Are we in danger of running out of new names? The answer to the last question is "no", for the simple reason that the vast majority of the names are not "thought up" there are elaborate rules for assigning names to chemical substances on the basis of their structures. There are more than 100 million named chemical substances. For those of you who plan to go on in chemistry, the really fun stuff comes later! But we can hardly talk about chemistry without mentioning some chemical substances, all of which do have names- and often, more than one! All we will try to do here is cover what you need to know to make sense of first-year chemistry.
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