To understand chemistry, it is essential to understand chemistry, no-minculejner. In this video, we'll look at how to name ionic compounds. Luckily, the naming process for ionic compounds is straightforward once you understand it. To review an ionic compound has two parts, the positive cation and the negative anion. When you name an ionic compound, you simply name the cation and the anion. For a typhoon ionic compound, where the ions are monotomic, the cation uses the same name as its element. So magnesium would just be magnesium and lithium would just be lithium. The anion uses the same root as its element, but ends with the suffix i. Chlorine becomes chloride and sulfur becomes sulfide. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what to call the anion. Like in the case of oxygen and oxide, that means a bit of practice can be good with these. As an example, let's look at table salt. Table salt consists of a sodium cation and a chlorine anion. The sodium cation keeps its element's name and the chlorine anion uses the suffix i to become chloride. Thus, the name of the compound is sodium chloride. However, there are some elements which can form multiple cations. That means the same two elements can form multiple different compounds. In order to stay specific, we have to specify which cation is in the compound. To do that, we put a Roman numeral and practices next to the element's name. The Roman numeral represents the charge of the cation. For example, ion can form cation with a positive charge of 2 or 3. When we write the name of a cation, we write I and 2 when it has a charge of 2 or I and 3 when it has a charge of 3. There are some ions that are in the multiple atoms called polyatomic ions. While the previous ions were given names based on their elements, polyatomic ions can have multiple ions. Unfortunately, the only way to know the names of polyatomic ions is to memorize them. Here is a chart of the most common polyatomic ions to get you started.