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Not all elements can be identified by a single letter. For example, Carbon (C) and Chlorine (Cl) both start with a "C" and have "C"'s in their symbols. Another letter had to be added to distinguish the two. Also, the Periodic Table has over 100 elements and there would not be enough letters to cover them all if they were only single letters.

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Why do some symbols have one letter some have two letters and some have three letters?

Elements are give symbols consisting of letters, and these are related to the names of the elements (in some language at some date). There are 26 letters in many alphabets, but more than four times that number of elements. So it is necessary to use some mechanism to distinguish among elements with names that start with the same letter. Adding numbers is done to designate the number of atoms in a compound, the isotope, and so on. The best solutions is to use pairs of letters for most elements.


Why do some elements have a number and some have symbols?

A way to know what this means is to know that the reason being is because it is a Isotope. An istotope is something that has too many nuetrons or more than one nuetron. So that is what they call it...


How many capitalletters does a elements have?

Chemical elements and compounds are written with lower case letters. Only for chemical symbols do you use capitals, such as Cu for copper, etc.


How many letter symbols can an element have?

Most elements have either 1 or 2 letters but some elements such as Ununpentium, have 3 (Uup)


How many elements are listed on the periodic table that has symbols for them?

All the elements listed on periodic table has symbols for them.There are total 118 elements in periodic table.


How many elements have two letters in their symbol?

Well, isn't that a happy little question! There are five elements with two letters in their symbol: aluminum (Al), sulfur (S), silicon (Si), chlorine (Cl), and potassium (K). Each element brings its own unique beauty to the canvas of the periodic table.


Why must some chemical elements have two letters rather than one?

The reason why some element symbols have two letters instead of one is that some elements start with the same letter. It would be very difficult to distinguish elements if two both had the same symbol. For example, Carbon and Calcium both start with the letter "C", but Calcium's symbol is "Ca". Also, some, like Iron's "Fe", were named a long time ago, and chemists had different names for them.


How many elements have 1 letter symbols?

There are 3 elements with 1-letter symbols in the periodic table: Hydrogen (H), Helium (He), and Uranium (U).


Why are there so many atomic symbols?

Because there's lots of elements.


How many elements have two symbols?

Every element recognized so far has a unique symbol in the periodic table. Some has one letter in their symbol, where many have two letters. A set of recently discovered elements using nuclear fission reactions have three.


How many lines of symmetry does a keyboard have?

zero, all the keys have different letters, numbers, or symbols


How many symbols do compounds have?

The formulas of compounds contain as many unique symbols as the number of elements they contain. Sodium hypochlorite (bleach) has the formula NaClO which means that it contains the three elements sodium (Na), chlorine (Cl) and oxygen (O).