Chemical property

A chemical property is any of a material's properties that becomes evident during a chemical reaction; that is, any quality that can be established only by changing a substance's chemical identity. Simply speaking, chemical properties cannot be determined just by viewing or touching the substance; the substance's internal structure must be affected for its chemical properties to be investigated.

Chemical properties can be contrasted with physical properties, which can be discerned without changing the substance's structure. However, for many properties within the scope of physical chemistry, and other disciplines at the border of chemistry and physics, the distinction may be a matter of researcher's perspective. Material properties, both physical and chemical, can be viewed as supervenient; i.e., secondary to the underlying reality. Several layers of superveniency are possible.

Chemical properties can be used for building chemical classifications.

Examples of chemical properties

• Reactivity against other chemical substances
• Heat of combustion
• Enthalpy of formation
• Toxicity
• Chemical stability in a given environment
• Flammability
• Preferred oxidation state(s)
• Coordination number
• Capability to undergo a certain set of transformations e.g. molecular dissociation, chemical combination, redox reactions under certain physical conditions in the presence of another chemical substance
• Preferred types of bonds to form, e.g. metallic, ionic, covalent

See also

Chemistry portal

• Physical property
• Chemical structure
• Material properties
• Biological activity
• Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR)
• Lipinski's Rule of Five, describing molecular properties of drugs