coordination number

American  

noun

Crystallography.

1. the number of anions surrounding a single cation in a stable crystal structure.

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coordination number British  

noun

1. chem the number of coordinated species surrounding the central atom in a complex or crystal

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Etymology

Origin of coordination number

First recorded in 1905–10

Example Sentences

The RDF method, being an isotropic average of a two-body data set, tells us very little quantitatively about the sample—the average nearest neighbor distance, the average coordination number, and the mean density—and it determines these values precisely.

From Science Magazine

A number called the isoperimetric quotient, which roughly captures a particle's shape based solely on its volume and surface area, and a measure called coordination number, which describes how many close neighbors a particle has, predicted 94 percent of the time which of the crystalline forms a polyhedron would take.

From Scientific American

Type, the coordination type; Number, the coordination number; R, interatomic distance; and σ2, the measure of the static disorder of the shell.

From Science Magazine