Acids oxoacids

A ternary compound consists of three elements. Ternary acids (oxoacids) are compounds of hydrogen, oxygen, and (usually) a nonmetal. Nonmetals that exhibit more than one oxidation state form more than one ternary acid. These ternary acids differ in the number of oxygen atoms they contain. The suffixes -ous and -ic following the stem name of the central element indicate lower and higher oxidation states, respectively. One common ternary acid of each nonmetal is (somewhat arbitrarily) designated as the -ic acid. That is, it is named by putting the element stem before the -ic suffix. The common ternary -ic acids are shown in Table 4-16. It is important to learn the names and formulas of these acids, because the names of all other ternary acids and salts are derived from them. There are no common -ic ternary acids for the omitted nonmetals. 

Table 3.6 Some important hydroxy acids, oxoacids and epoxy acids occurring in lipids. ...

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