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The Roman numeral in a compound name is usually the oxidation state of the element it follows. For example, in copper (II) oxide, the II tells us the copper is in oxidation state +2.

This is modern nomenclature. The old system used suffixes (cupric oxide vs. cuprous oxide), requiring you to know that a) cupr- means "copper" (not so bad, but "ferr- means iron" or "stann- means tin" were less straightforward) and b) what the common oxidation states of copper were so you could decide which one was -ic and which one was -ous. Then there were prefixes like per- and hypo-. All told, it was a mess.

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11y ago

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