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Katy Caselli

How do you calculate electronegativity with 3 elements?

Andy Heilveil  Follow

There is no electronegativity in compounds. The electronegativities are for elements (atoms). Electronegativity is a measure of how strongly an atom attracts the electrons in a bond. An atom with high electronegativity attracts electrons strongly, while an atom with low electronegativity attracts them weakly. There is orbital electronegativity for elements. You can take them from tables.

Here is a Table for electronegativities of elements:

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CheeHock Chew  Follow

As your other answers have said, electronegativity in compounds is always with respect to a bond between two individual atoms. You can calculate the electronegativity difference between any two bonded atoms in a compound to find that their bond is either nonpolar covalent (difference < 0.4), polar covalent (difference between 0.4 - 1.7) or ionic (difference > 1.8).

Now, it IS possible for a compound to be polar, meaning that it has a net charge.

Say you have a compound like BeCl2. Now, Cl has a (relatively) high electro negativity, and there are two of them bonded to Be so you might think that this would be a polar molecule. But, this compound is linear and you can see from the “Lewis Diagram”

Cl-Be-Cl

The highly electronegative chloride atoms are evenly balanced on both sides of the Beryllium, therefore meaning the molecule is non polar.

But then, say you have something like NH3. Ammonia is pyramidal in shape, and so the molecule has a slight positive charge due to the uneven dispersion of the hydrogen atoms. Not as positively charged as NH4 mind you - NH3 is polar covalent whereas NH4 is ionic. But this is just a very quick, basic example of the conditions in which a molecule may be net polar due to the uneven distribution of electronegativities in the individual bonds

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