Nomenclature of organic compounds

Having established how to draw and how to classify organic molecules, the next essential skill is being able to NAME them -- and to name each one so precisely and unambiguously that any chemist, anywhere, given only the name, could reconstruct the exact same structure. Two broad naming traditions exist side by side: much older, historically-accumulated common (trivial) names, still genuinely useful and still widely used for many everyday compounds even today, and the modern, fully systematic IUPAC method, which is capable of generating one single, unique name for literally any organic structure, however complex. Both traditions are developed across the remainder of this section, moving from the informal, historical naming of section 14.4.1, through the general IUPAC framework of 14.4.2, and on into the detailed IUPAC rules for each major class of compound -- alkanes, alkenes …