Talk:Substituent

"-Ylidine"

I've made some changes to this article, merging in -yl and adding information from the IUPAC guidelines, but I never did get to the bottom of the original rainbow chase: where does the term "-ylidine" come from? As mentioned in the note in the article, it seems to be an irregular form of ylidene - for example, if you cut and paste the formula listed in the article for Sunitinib to Google, you can increase the number of results five-fold by changing the manufacturer's "ylidine" to "ylidene". But the word occurs too often in scientific publications to be a simple error. Does someone know where it comes/came from? Mike Serfas (talk) 06:04, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

"nor-"

It says "no residue" now, but doesn't nor- just mean we consider the parent structure and remove 1 CH2-group somewhere? So going down in the homologous series. Ethane would be nor-propane (just as norephedrine missing one CH2 relative to ephedrine) Gosseweening (talk) 12:05, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, you are correct. Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 04:50, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

History

This article should have a section on the history of the concept. For example, while reading old family documents I came across Gerhardt's system of chemical equivalents; after a Googlebooks search I found out that his system was that most chemical compounds could be explained as hydrochloric acid, water or ammonia, with 1-3 H's substituted by radicals - this sounds like the "history" of the substituent idea in Chemistry. Albmont (talk) 20:35, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Placing expert needed tag

For dire state of content of lede, at least. Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 04:49, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Honors Organic Chemistry I

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 2 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sn1243 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Sn1243 (talk) 01:32, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Greek error?

Checking in a well-known Greek dictionary (A Greek-English Lexicon, by Liddell and Scott), I find that ὕλη (hȳlē) means both wood, in the sense of forest, as well as wood in the sense of timber. Since methylene was distilled from wood, the ``Greek error´´ is questionable.

Very poorly sourced "-ylidine" statement

The article currently states:

The suffix -ylidine is encountered sporadically, and appears to be a variant spelling of "-ylidene"; it is not mentioned in the IUPAC guidelines.

I added here. The reference here is not actually a citation of a source but an improper synthesis; hover your mouse over it and you'll see. Additionally, it doesn't seem to be particularly noteworthy, since, according to the reference, only 18 entries include "ylidine" while 740 100 include "ylidene". The sources cited are also quite poor, since it's just number of search results and number of them which have "ylidene" synonyms, which is prone to change, and it does seem to have changed somewhat - there are 38 results for ylidine, and 1 249 299 results for ylidene, and I'm not interested in putting in the effort to manually go through all 38 results to determine how many of them have "ylidene" synonyms. Additionally, the original source for those numbers - presumably the search results page - is not even linked in the reference, and I don't think it's wise for me to add the link, since the numbers changed quite a bit and I'm not sure what the new values all are.~2026-12950-76 (talk) 15:51, 27 February 2026 (UTC)