Quote:
Originally Posted by striperman36
Why did they name it a mole, I'll never know
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Mole (unit) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The mole (symbol: mol) is a unit of amount of substance: it is an SI base unit,[1] and one of the few units used to measure this physical quantity.
The name "mole" was coined in German (as Mol) by Wilhelm Ostwald in 1893,[2] although the related concept of equivalent mass had been in use at least a century earlier.
The name is assumed to be derived from the word Molekül (molecule). The first usage in English dates from 1897, in a work translated from German.[3][4] The names gram-atom and gram-molecule have also been used in the same sense as "mole",[1][5] but these names are now obsolete.
The mole is defined as the amount of substance of a system that contains as many "elementary entities" (e.g. atoms, molecules, ions, electrons) as there are atoms in 12 g of carbon-12 (12C).[1]. A mole has 6.0221415×1023[6] atoms or molecules of the pure substance being measured. A mole will possess mass exactly equal to the substance's molecular/atomic weight in grams. Because of this, one can measure the number of moles in a pure substance by weighing it and comparing the result to its molecular/atomic weight.