brands market the same medications. As a medical student, you’ll have to know both: while a
doctor may order atorvastatin 40 mg qd, patients will tell you they’re taking Lipitor daily.
For doctors, a generic name is sufficiently unambiguous to specify a given compound, but this is not
true within the pharmaceutical industry. Medications are usually large organic compounds with
many functional groups and numerous chiral centers. Chemists needed to be able to describe such
compounds, as well as innumerably many others. Thus, within chemistry, a specific set of rules for
naming and describing compounds was designed. In this chapter, we’ll examine the steps for
naming a compound and then practice applying them to example compounds. By the end of the
chapter, we’ll have discussed the most common functional groups for Test Day and how they relate
to each other in the nomenclature hierarchy. Note that you may have learned nomenclature for a
number of other compounds, including ethers, epoxides, amines, imines, sulfonic acids, and others
in your organic chemistry courses; we have restricted the content of this chapter to only the
functional groups you are expected to identify on Test Day.
MCAT EXPERTISE
According to the AAMC, the MCAT will not include standalone, nomenclature-only organic
chemistry questions (such as “name this compound” questions). But as you probably
remember from your own classes, nomenclature is the very foundation of the entire subject
of organic chemistry, and you will lose points on Test Day if you don’t have nomenclature
down cold.