Question

How can electronegativity be measured?

Answer 1

It's not measured.

In fact, Linus Pauling made up the electronegativity of `4.0` for fluorine, and used a nice equation he figured out that uses experimentally-determined bond energies for the interactions of same and different bonding members to calculate the remaining electronegativities in reference to that of fluorine.

I've explained his findings here:

http://socratic.org/scratchpad/062c8620310f06cf38e8