Organic nomenclature in Chinese

The Chinese Chemical Society^[a] (CCS; simplified Chinese: 中国化学会; traditional Chinese: 中國化學會) lays out a set of rules based on those given by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) for the purpose of systematic organic nomenclature in Chinese. The chemical names derived from these rules are meant to correspond with the English IUPAC name in a manner that is close to one-to-one, while being adapted to and taking advantage of the logographic nature of the Chinese written language. A standard set of characters invented during the 20th century (vide infra), along with characters for the chemical elements and characters corresponding to standard chemical prefixes and suffixes, are used for this purpose.

Derivation of Chinese characters[]

The majority of the Chinese characters used for this purpose are phonosemantic compounds, with part of the character giving a general semantic category and the other part providing a pronunciation, usually based on the international (European) pronunciation. There are four common radicals (the part of the character that gives the semantic category) for these characters:

• 火 (huǒ, fire) e.g.: 烷 (wán, alkane), common for hydrocarbons
• 酉 (yǒu, ritual wine vessel) e.g.: 酮 (tóng, ketone), common for oxygenated functionalities
• 艸 (cǎo, grass) e.g. 苯 (běn, benzene, phenyl), common for aromatic compounds and terpenes
• 肉 (ròu, meat, flesh) e.g. 腙 (zōng, hydrazone), common for nitrogen-containing functionalities

Additionally, the mouth radical (口, kǒu) is affixed to characters that are used for their sound only. This occurs often in the transliteration of the names of heterocyclic compounds, (e.g., 吡啶, "bǐdìng", pyridine). These characters are also used for the transliteration of non-chemical terms from foreign languages.

Table[]

Below is a table, in pinyin order, of the Chinese names of major organic compounds, radicals, and functional groups. Characters given are in traditional Chinese, followed by simplified Chinese where possible. Since the characters are modern creations, the traditional Chinese characters are analogous (with traditional components in place of simplified components). The Mandarin pronunciation of each character, as said in Mainland China, is in pronunciation column. Any Taiwanese pronunciations that differ from the Mainland Chinese pronunciations are put in the notes. Other usages of characters are etymologically unrelated to the character's meaning as names for organic compounds, radicals, and functional groups unless otherwise stated. This list is not exhaustive, although many of the other characters used for this purpose can only be found in specialist dictionaries.