is iron (iii) permanganate polar or nonpolar?

Let's start with the tl;dr version (longer explanation follows):

you'd call the compound to be ionic since polar and non-polar are, in conventional terminology reserved for covalent molecules which Iron Permanganate is not.

Longer explanation:

In case of molecules being polar or non-polar implicitly means that the molecule is covalent.

A polar molecule therefore would be a covalent molecule which has a resultant of non-zero dipole moment when we do a vector addition of all bond dipole moments. Example: molecules like water and ammonia.

In a water molecule, both O-H bonds are polarised and the oxygen atom has a slight negative charge accumulation and the hydrogens are slightly (but not fully) positive. This is an example of a polar covalent molecule. Carbon dioxide on the other side is a non-polar covalent molecule since both C-O bond dipoles cancel each other out.

PS: I might err too and don't claim to be fully right. Fundamental questions like these are usually the toughest to explain since they involve revisiting the most basic of concepts which we usually start to take for granted as we become comfortable with the subject.

/r/chemistry Thread