inter and intramolecular forces are a big Topic in chemistry and being able to understand the difference is crucial to your success and the good thing about these forces is that they are pretty simple to understand and there is really only one key difference to remember so make sure you stick around until the end of the video where we will cover that one key difference but before we do that we first need to establish what are inter and intra molecular forces simply put an inmolecular force is a force that exists between two atoms within a molecule it is important to stress that these forces exist within one molecule make sure to write this down as this will be very important later on so for example if I have a water molecule this Force here is an intr molecular Force as it is the force that is holding the hydrogen atom and the oxygen atom together so going along with that same idea you can probably guess that this Force right here is also intermolecular force as it is holding the other hydrogen atom to the oxygen atom now you might be thinking wait a minute this is just a bond and if you're thinking that you would be correct intermolecular forces are forces that hold one atom to another atom in a molecule and these are known as bonds remember that we have different types of bonds from ionic to calent to metallic these are all examples of intramolecular forces so if intramolecular forces are the forces within a molecule holding the molecule together what then are intermolecular forces well inter inter molecular forces are forces that exist between two or more molecules it is important to stress that these forces exist between two different molecules these forces are the forces that are holding one molecule to another molecule so for example when one water molecule is attracted to another water molecule the force that is holding them together is called an intermolecular force now notice I said that these were attracted to each other and not bonded together it is important to remember that a bond occur occurs only when there's a sharing or transfer of electrons intermolecular forces do not involve the sharing or transfer of electrons so it would be wrong to call them bonds they are simply attractions that have formed due to regions of opposite charge we cover bonding and intermolecular forces in a lot more detail in some of our other videos which I will link in the description so make sure you check those out okay so now that you know what intra and intermolecular forces are the key difference should now be pretty obvious vious and that difference is where the force is occurring the prefix intra means within or inside so you can think of intr molecular forces occurring within or inside one molecule the prefix inter means between or among so you can think of intermolecular forces as being forces that occur between or among two or more molecules I like to think of this like the intranet versus the internet if you are not familiar with the interet you can think of it as a network that can be accessed within one building or let's say a company so like when you're at school there is a specific Network that can only be accessed at school you can save documents or other files on the school interet and you can only access those files when you are at the school or have access to the school network called the internet now the internet is something I'm sure you're much more familiar with the Internet connects many different entities together so for example you can access the internet anywhere so if you save files on the internet like in your Google drive or something like that you can access those files anywhere that you have internet access so the internet is a connection between many different entities just like the intermolecular forces are forces that connect many different molecules together while the intranet is a network that provides connection within one group or organization just like intr molecular forces are connections or bonds that occur within only one molecule if you made it this far thanks for watching hopefully now you have a better understanding of the difference between inter and intr molecular forces if you haven't already make sure to subscribe as this is the best way to help us on our journey to make science simple if you enjoyed this video here are a couple more videos you might find helpful [Music]