Chemistry Slang

Any chemistry student will learn IUPAC nomenclature in her first month of college. Most chemies will start using nomenclature during everyday conversations, referring for example to salt as sodium chloride. This is mostly to show off.

The true synthetic chemists, who spent years doing benchwork, have their own language. The author, currently an intern in a federal lab, met a few and they are much harder to understand. So here it is: how to speak like somebody who does twenty step syntheses in his sleep.

Firstly, most industrial chemicals have names that have been in use for a hundred year. Here are some common ones:

• Sulfuric acid = oil of vitriol or just vitriol
• Hydrochloric acid = muriatic acid, less commonly spirits of salt
• Hydrogen Cyanide = Prussic acid. Hope you will not hear about it in the lab.
• Sodium hydroxide = caustic soda or lye
• Magnesium hydroxide = milk of magnesia
• Potassium hydroxide = caustic potash, potash lye
• Calcium hydroxide = slaked lime, milk of lime
• Calcium oxide = quicklime
• Ammonia = spirit of hartshorn (very obscure, only industry still uses it)
• Nitric acid = spirit of nitre or aqua fortis, if you are into latin
• Potassium nitrate = nitre, nitre of potash or saltpeter
• The saltpeters are really interesting has they are generally named after their country of origin. Good examples include Peru saltpeter (sodium nitrate), German saltpeter (ammonium nitrate) and Norway saltpeter (calcium nitrate).

Inorganic industrial chemicals are not the only ones with weird names. From organic chemistry:

• Ethanol = Grain alcohol
• Methanol = Wood spirits
• Alkanes = paraffins, the functional group is an amyl group
• Alkenes = olefins
• Alkynes = acetylenes
• Hydrogen peroxide = dioxidane
• Pure organic acids are sometimes termed glacial, a term common for acetic acid but sometimes still applied to other simple acids that crystallize above 0 celsius, for example formic acid. Calling pure phenol glacial carbolic acid will properly turn a few heads in an organic chemistry class.

As far as the periodic table is concerned, everybody knows what alkali metals, alkali earth metals and noble gases are. Not nearly as common, though, is the name pnictogens (or for the true old-schools pentels) for the nitrogen group and the name chalcogens for the oxygen group.

So go on! Impress your fellow schoolmates!
I'll add more as I discover them.