In this video, we're going to take a look at how we name symmetrical versus asymmetrical amines. Now, here we're going to say that secondary and tertiary amines can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. By symmetrical, we mean that all alkyl groups are identical. For asymmetrical, that means at least one alkyl group is different. If we take a look here, it says provide a systematic name for the following amine. Well, this structure is asymmetrical because my two alkyl groups are not the same. So step 0, if symmetrical, follow steps in common naming. Well, here it's not symmetrical, so we can ignore step 0.
Step 1, we're going to say if asymmetrical, we're going to identify the largest carbon chain connected to nitrogen and name it as an amine. Here we're going to use numerical location to indicate the location of nitrogen. So the larger chain is this one, so we're going to number it from the end closest to the nitrogen. So 1,2,3. Three carbons is propane, but we drop the 'e' ending to amine, so it becomes propanamine. Then we're going to say here that the nitrogen is connected to carbon number 1, so this would be 1-propanamine.
Now go to step 2. Name other alkyl groups alphabetically as N-substituents. If they are identical alkyl groups, use the numerical prefix di. Well, here, this one is 1, 2 carbons. It's an ethyl. It's attached to the nitrogen, so it's an N-ethyl. So this would be N-ethyl-1-propanamine.
Now step 3, this is stuff we've known from long ago in terms of naming different types of organic molecules. So here we'd use, to separate numbers, we'd use commas. And to separate letters from numbers, we'd use dashes. Letters are not separated from letters. All right. So again, step 3 is something we've been doing consistently when it comes to naming under the IUPAC naming system, so that’s why it's kind of grayed out in this box. It's something that you should always have in the back of your mind in terms of naming. But for this particular amine, it's N-ethyl-1-propanamine as the name.