Isomerism

ISOMERISM

Figure 67.

As you have seen, different combinations of carbon and hydrogen atoms can have different basic structures. With isomerism, you can see that there are more structures than you can imagine. An isomer is a molecule that has the same number of atoms but different structural or spatial arrangements of the atoms within the molecule. This leads to more than ten million organic compounds.

There are five different types of isomerism—many more than the simple structural isomerism we have already discussed (in which there is a structural difference between two molecules. The two broad groups of isomerism are structural isomerism and stereoisomers. Let’s look at the different types of isomerism.