Most Electronegative Chemical Elements

About This Dataset

This chart ranks chemical elements by electronegativity on the Pauling scale, a measure of how strongly an atom pulls on shared electrons in a chemical bond. Fluorine is the most electronegative element. Noble gases are excluded.

✨ AI Insight

Fluorine 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.

Source: Pauling Electronegativity Scale

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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Fluorine leads with 4 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 3 · median: 3.

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Gap in All Time: Fluorine is 1.6× larger than Gold.