Introduction

Amines are organic compounds containing nitrogen, and their defining chemical character is basicity, arising from the lone pair of electrons that nitrogen carries even after bonding. They are far from a laboratory curiosity: amines occur throughout the natural world, forming part of the structure of proteins (through the amino-acid building blocks that make them up), of many vitamins, of hormones that regulate the body, and of plant-derived compounds such as nicotine. This chapter builds up the whole picture of amine chemistry -- how amines are classified and named, how they are prepared in the laboratory, their physical properties, why they are basic and how that basicity varies between different classes of amine, their characteristic chemical reactions (including the special chemistry of the aromatic diazonium salts they can form), and how the amino group directs further reaction on an aromatic ring.