The name Fauvel points to the French fauve ('chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn'), another sense of fauve meaning the class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, and the medieval belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of deceit and dishonesty.
An oxidizing agent is a reactant that removes electrons from other reactants during a redox reaction. The oxidizing agent typically takes these electrons for itself, thus gaining electrons and being reduced. An oxidizing agent is thus an electron acceptor.
Another example is hydrogen peroxide, in which the oxygen atom is in the -1 oxidation state. Because this oxidation state lies between the extremes of the more common 0 and -2 oxidation states of oxygen, H 2 O 2 can act as either an oxidizing agent or a reducing agent.eaker oxidizing agent. weaker reducing agent. On the basis of many such experiments, the common oxidation-reduction half-reactions have been organized into a table in which the strongest reducing agents are at one end and the strongest oxidizing agents are at the other, as shown in the table below.