Definition
The term electronegativity is almost as old as chemistry itself, but Pauling (1960) defined it as ‘the power of an atom in a molecule to attract electrons to itself’ and first gave it an empirical scale. Pauling's electronegativity is not a property of an isolated atom, but of an atom in the environment and under the influence of surrounding atoms. After Pauling's definition of electronegativity, numerous chemists and physicists have tried to improve the scale by proposing more empirically or theoretically certain methods of its measurement. Many of these methods measure an ‘absolute’ electronegativity of a free atom, which is contradictory to Pauling's original definition. The concept of electronegativity as ‘relative versus absolute’ is still controversial among chemists; some authors think that Pauling's scale is only of historical interest, but others do not agree (Pearson, 1990).
The difference in electronegativity between the bond-forming atoms determines the bond...
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Yu, J.Y. (1998). Electronegativity . In: Geochemistry. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4496-8_93
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4496-8_93
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