Ask a Teacher

An electron shell may be thought of as an orbit followed by electrons around an atom's nucleus. The closest shell to the nucleus is called the "1 shell" (also called "K shell"), followed by the "2 shell" (or "L shell"), then the "3 shell" (or "M shell"), and so on further and further from the nucleus. The shell letters K, L, M, ... are alphabetical.

Each shell can contain only a fixed number of electrons: The 1st shell can hold up to two electrons, the 2nd shell can hold up to eight electrons, the 3rd shell can hold up to 18, and so on. Since electrons are electrically attracted to the nucleus, an atom's electrons will generally occupy outer shells only if the more inner shells have already been completely filled by other electrons. However, this is not a strict requirement: Atoms may have two or even three outer shells that are only partly filled with electrons.

Each shell is composed of one or more subshells, which are themselves composed of atomic orbitals. For example, the first (K) shell has one subshell, called "1s"; the second (L) shell has two subshells, called "2s" and "2p"; the third shell has "3s", "3p", and "3d"; and so on