Re: How do chemical symbolsand formulas help scientists around the world?

Hi Shivani,

Thanks for asking such a great question. I can see why learning chemical symbols might seem sort of pointless when you can just write down the name for the element, but remember that the names for the various elements are not the same in all languages. There are more than 6,000 languages being spoken all over the world, with their own histories and their own words for the various elements. Small mistakes in translation between languages can somtimes lead to large misunderstandings (for example, in English, the word 'gift' has a nice meaning, but in German it means 'poison'), but scientists need to be precise and exact when they are communicating.

While there may be 6,000 different words for the element Carbon, that element is the same all around the world, so scientists have adopted a single symbol to represent Carbon so that we all know what we mean, regardless of what languge we speak. So a scientist who only speaks English knows exactly what a scientist who only speaks Japanese means when she uses the symbol C.

I've made a table (below) of the words for some common elements taken from various European languages. I picked these languages because they all (mostly) use the same symbols to represent speech sounds, but many other languages (like, Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) use completely different symbols to represent speech sounds, and I can't even show them to you here. Nevertheless, we all use the same symbols to represent elements, so we can all understand a chemical formula when we see it.

So, now imagine you are a scientist, and a German colleage sends you a formula where she has written all of the names of the elements in German. Would you rather have to get out a German- English dictionary so that you could translate "wasserstoff-2-sauerstoff", or would you be happier if she just wrote down H2O?

Anyway, I hope you can see how using chemical symbols helps scientists around the world to communicate with one another. If you have more quesitons about international standards for chemistry (although this may be somewhat advanced for you), take a look at the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) web pages. For example, take a look at this recent announcement about the naming of element 111, now known as roentgenium (Rg).

Keep asking questions!