Chemical element meaning "no life") for "nitrogen". For purposes of international communication and trade, the official names of the chemical elements both ancient and more recently recognized are decided by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which has decided on a sort of international English language, drawing on traditional English names even when an element's chemical symbol is based on a Latin or other traditional word, for example adopting "gold" rather than "aurum" as the name for the 79th element (Au). IUPAC prefers the British spellings "aluminium" and "caesium" over the U.S. spellings "aluminum" and "cesium", and the U.S.
Term symbol database, neutral atoms are identified as I, singly ionized atoms as II, etc. Neutral atoms of the chemical elements have the same term symbol "for each column" in the s-block and p-block elements, but may differ in d-block and f-block elements, if the ground state electron configuration changes within a column. Ground state term symbols for chemical elements are given below. For light atoms, the spin-orbit interaction (or coupling) is small so that the total orbital angular momentum "L" and total spin "S" are good quantum numbers. The interaction between "L" and "S" is known as "LS coupling," "Russell-Saunders" "coupling"