Organic compounds substitutive-type nomenclature

During Werner s time compositional nomenclature for binary compounds had already been agreed upon in much the same way as today, and names such as manganese dichloride and manganese monooxide were in common use to express information about stoichiometric compositions only. For complex compounds, this type of nomenclature had simply b n extended as in the notational example 3 KCN,Fe(CN)3. Werner realized that diis notation could be modified to became a nomenclature including structural information, when this was available, and potassium hexacyanoferriate is his ingenious proposal (2). This is an example of what is today referred to as additive nomenclature or coordination nomenclature, as opposed to the substitutional nomenclature of organic chemistry. 

The systematic names of the binary fluorine-nitrogen compounds are only used for a few substances, whereas the organic substitutional type of nomenclature is widely used. Thus, NF3 is called by its systematic name nitrogen trifluoride (and not trifluoroamine), but N2F4 is generally named tetrafluorohydrazine instead of dinitrogen tetrafluoride and N3F fluorine azide instead of trinitrogen fluoride. Subsequently, there are sometimes up to three names for... 

It was proposed admittedly as a compromise suggestion which might be acceptable to both the nomenclaturists and the terpene chemists. To avoid indefinite extension of terpene-type names to allied compounds no longer classed as terpenes, which is undesirable from the overall nomenclature viewpoint, and in an attempt to resolve the troublesome problem of where to cut off the use of the names based on trivial names and substitute the systematic names, the arbitrary addition of only one or two carbon atoms to a parent carbon skeleton was proposed. Such practice is not usual procedure in organic nomenclature. 

---