Organic chemistry nomenclature can be difficult.

 

Learning organic chemistry is like trying to work in a foreign country; if you don’t know the language, it is going to be very difficult to learn how to do your job.  Imagine that you have just been transported to the mythical country of “ochemia”, a small island nation in the south Pacific, where your job is to write chemistry reactions.

Frequently, in a chemistry lecture, professors start tossing out strange organic chemistry nomenclature terms far too quickly.  Because students aren’t fluent in “ochemia” yet, they need to translate each word in their head to understand what the instructor has just said.  By the time this mental translation is done, the student has just missed the next sentence and has lost half of the lecture.  Our goal is to get as fluent as we can in the language of chemistry as quickly as we can.  Here are some terms it will be helpful to memorize so that you don’t have to do a mental translation when you hear them:

 

Meth = 1

Eth= 2

Prop = 3

But = 4

Pent = 5

Hex = 6

Hept = 7

Oct = 8

Non = 9

Dec = 10

Nucleophile = has electrons, has a negative or partial negative charge

Halogen = F, Cl, Br, I

Aprotic solvents = do not contain OH or NH bonds

Protic solvents = contain OH or NH bonds

Lewis Acid = electron acceptor

Lewis Base = electron donor

Carbonyl group =  (C=O)

Cis = same side of a double bond or ring

Trans = opposite sides of a double bond or ring

Electrophile = wants electrons, has a positive or partial positive charge

 

For more help with this, here is a pretty good glossary with pictures.  I really like this resource, good one to bookmark.