Noble gases are monatomic. What does monatomic mean?

1 Answer
Aug 25, 2017

Well,

  • "mono" means one.
  • "atomic" means of or pertaining to atoms.

So... monatomic elements are single-atom elements. And we remove the second "o" in "mono" since "atomic" starts with a vowel.

We don't see diatomic noble gases in nature. We do, however, see...

  • diatomic hydrogen
  • diatomic oxygen
  • diatomic fluorine
  • diatomic bromine
  • diatomic iodine
  • diatomic nitrogen
  • diatomic chlorine