Most Electronegative Chemical Elements
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Most Electronegative Chemical ElementsFluorine tops the Pauling scale at 3.98, making it the most electronegative element and the benchmark against which the scale is defined. Oxygen (3.44), chlorine (3.16) and nitrogen (3.04) follow, and together these four electron-hungry non-metals drive much of chemistry, from water to DNA. Electronegativity then falls steadily: bromine (2.96) and iodine (2.66) trail their lighter halogen relatives, reflecting the periodic trend that electronegativity decreases down a group. A striking entry is gold (2.54), the most electronegative metal, sitting alongside carbon and selenium near the bottom of this top ten. The tight clustering of values between 2.5 and 3.0 shows how narrowly separated most reactive non-metals are once fluorine and oxygen are set aside.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Pauling Electronegativity Scale
- Coverage
- 10 entities · 10 observations
- Measure
- Electronegativity (Pauling scale)
- Last updated
- 7 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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