the.com/electronegativity
An atom's greed for shared electrons, quantified so chemists can gossip precisely.
means A measure of how strongly an atom pulls shared electrons toward itself when bonded to another atom.
from Built from 'electro-' (electricity, ultimately from Greek 'elektron,' amber — rubbed amber was the first thing humans noticed could hold a charge) plus 'negative,' the label given to one of the two poles of electric charge, plus the noun-forming '-ity.' The concept, and the term, got its real chemical teeth in the 20th century when Linus Pauling worked out a numerical scale from bond-energy data, turning a vague notion of atomic 'pull' into something chemists could actually calculate and compare.
- scale inventor
- Linus Pauling, who also loved vitamin C excessively
- greediest element
- fluorine, the undisputed electron bully
- least interested
- francium, barely bothers to hold its own
- bond consequence
- big gaps create ionic bonds, small gaps share nicely