Geneva Rules

The Geneva Rules are the rules established by the International Chemistry Committee in 1892. These rules were the beginning of international cooperation for organic chemistry nomenclature.^[1] They were decided upon by a group of 34 of leading chemists from 9 different European nations. Their goal was to provide rules for the naming of aliphatic compounds, some of which are still in place today such as the longest chain provides the parent name and a functional group is indicated by a suffix. They also intended to extend the rules to include naming schemes for cyclic compounds however this did not occur.

The rules

The Geneva rules for nomenclature were described in 62 paragraphs.^[2] Some of these rules were:

• Saturated hydrocarbons would have names ending in -ane.
• The traditional names of the first 4 in the series was to be kept (methane, ethane, propane and butane)
• Longer chains were to have their names derived from the appropriate Greek numeral e.g. pent (pentane), hex (hexane) etc.
• When naming compounds with side chains the name would be determined by the longest straight chain with a substituted group e.g. methyl propane (CH₃CH(CH₃)CH₃)
• The endings ene and ine were indicative of the presence of a double and triple bond respectively.
• For closed chain hydrocarbons the term "cyclo" was to be used meaning what was known as hexamethylene (C₆H₁₂) would now be called cyclohexane^[3]

Attendees

Further reading

Evieux, E. A. (1954-06-01). "The Geneva Congress on Organic Nomenclature, 1892". Journal of Chemical Education. 31 (6): 326.

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