Talk:Substituent

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)

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)

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)

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

{{dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment | course = Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/Umiversity_of_Alabama_at_Birmingham/Honors_Organic_Chemistry_I_(Fall_2022) | assignments = Sn1243 | start_date = 2022-08-22 | end_date = 2022-12-02 }}

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

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.