how do you name the ionic compound bas
Ionic compounds are easily recognized because they contain a metal and a nonmetal. Covalent compounds are those which contain only nonmetals. The periodic table in the front cover of your text shows which elements fall into each class. The names for ionic compounds are very simple. The first part of the name is simply the name of the metal element. The second part of the name is the name of the nonmetal element, with the ending changed to the suffix âide. For example, consider the compound Al 2 O 3. While the subscripts indicate that the compound consists of two atoms of aluminum and three atoms of oxygen, these numbers do not affect the name. The first part of the name would be aluminum. For the second part of the name, we drop the ending on oxygen and add âide, thus it becomes oxide. The name of the compound is then aluminum oxide. When an ionic compound contains a transition metal, the names become a bit more complicated. The metals in the d and f blocks can have more than one charge and can thus form more than one compound. For example, iron and chlorine form two different compounds, FeCl 2 and FeCl 3. To distinguish them,