 In this video we're going to look at putting the names of the ions together in order to name some simple ionic compounds. Ionic compounds are made from cations and anions bonded together. The opposite charges attract and the ions are held together. Usually, though not always, the positive ion is a metal and the negative one is a non-metal. So you can recognize many ionic compounds from the fact that they're made from a metal and a non-metal. To name these compounds, the positive ion is always named first and then the negative ion. Let's look at table salt. This is sodium chloride. It's made of the elements sodium and chlorine. We name the positive ion first, in this case it's sodium, and then we would name the negative ion next. We would look, we would see that the element is chlorine, but we know that for a negative monatomic ion, the end of the name is changed to iod. So instead of chlorine, we have chloride. If we write the formula, we put down the symbols of the two elements. In the formula of a compound like this, we don't specify the charges of the ions. You'll see in a little while that the charges are sort of implicit in the formula. The important thing about the formula is that it must have no overall charge. That is, the amount of positive charge must exactly equal the amount of negative charge. We can check this is the case for sodium chloride. The sodium ion has a plus one charge and the chloride ion has a minus one charge. So if we have one of each of them, then the positive of the sodium cancels out the negative of the chloride and it's neutral. And that means that our formula NACL is correct. It shows that there is one of each ion.