What is the difference between a chemical element and atom?

Question

If there is no difference then why are elements called elements and not atoms in the periodic table?
Thank you for any help

Answer 1

A chemical element, often called simply an element, is a substance that cannot be decomposed or transformed into other chemical substances by ordinary chemical processes. All matter consists of these elements and as of 2006, 117 unique elements have been discovered or artificially created. The smallest particle of such an element is an atom, which consists of electrons centered about a nucleus of protons and neutrons.

Answer 2

When you speak of atoms you are speaking of the smallest divisible unit or mass with specific chemical, and nuclear
characteristics.

When you bring chemistry into the discussion you are basically
talking about how atoms interacts.

For example, the diatomic elements for example like oxygen and hydrogen do not like to be exist alone ... they have so much attraction for other things and each other that they are hardly ever found as free elements, they usually stick to each other ... like O2 and H2.

Some elements such as Polonium or Einsteinium do not even naturally exist or exist for very short periods of time, but when they do exist chemically, their atoms always have the specific properties.

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

Water is a compound.

It has two elements, hydrogen and oxygen.

The element hydrogen consists of a number of molecules.

Though each molecule is an element, we don’t call a single molecule as element because an element (consisting of many number of molecules can exist in different phases for example in solid or in liquid or in gas phases).

Thus a single molecule is different from an element. A single molecule cannot be in a liquid or solid state.

A hydrogen molecule consists of two atoms. The property of a molecule is entirely different from a single hydrogen atom.

Hence to distinguish them we speak of hydrogen atom and hydrogen molecule.

Now consider mono-atomic molecule.

Under (STP), all of the are monatomic.

All elements will be monoatomic in the gas phase at sufficiently large temperatures.

No element is monoatomic in solid or liquid phase


Thus to explain the behaviour and characteristics we are in need of different nomenclatures such as element, molecule and atom.

Answer 4

It has mostly to to with word usage, but it's more subtle than that. An element refers collectively to all atoms which have the same number of protons in their nuclei, but the number of neutrons may vary. An atom is an individual *particle* with protons and neutrons in the nucleus surrounded by a number of electrons bound to it. A more specific way of organizing atoms would be by isotope. To be the same isotope, atoms have to have the same number of neutrons too.

An analogy would be genus and species vs. animal:

Q: What genus[element] is that atom[animal]?
A: Canis[Lithium]
Q: Oh, which species[isotope]?
A: Lupus[Lithium-6]
Q: Shouldn't it be in cage[Isn't that a controlled nuclear material]?

Answer 5

I think that the elements, although the same, are what are dug from the earth or harvested from the earth en masse. An atom is one single unit that represents that mass.