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I saw the question, "Is the strength of hydrogen bonding greater in hydrogen peroxide or water?" and it made me think of a question on hydrogen bonding:

If an oxygen on a water has a hydrogen bond to another water (or anything else), would adding another hydrogen bond to that water (perhaps by introducing another water), decrease the strength of the first hydrogen bond?

My initial thought is it that it wouldn't because oxygen is electronegative enough that is can attract another hydrogen bond with minimal effect to the other bond.

However, if a single water could attract an unlimited number of other waters to it (ignoring space constraints), wouldn't the strength of hydrogen bonds weaken as the number of bonds to the oxygen increase as it's dividing up its electronegativity across multiple bonds?

Melanie Shebel
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    Well, I think the other part of the definition is contains a hydrogen atom. ;-) But I see you point. Let's see what others come up with. – Karl Feb 25 '19 at 23:19
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    Related: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_hydrogen_bonding.html – Tyberius Feb 28 '19 at 04:21
  • A huge problem with the way this is posed is the “ignoring space constraints” bit of it. In reality there will be extremely non-trivial steric effects going on if you have any more than 1 group hydrogen bonding to any other molecular site. – Matt Hanson Aug 25 '23 at 03:32

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