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In his philosophic musings “Meditations” the Emperor Marcus Aurelius asks “This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what its causal nature?” 1 The history of chemistry, and in particular medicinal chemistry, is an elaboration of these three questions as applied to molecules:“What is the essence of a molecule? What is it made of? What will it do?” In trying to answer these questions, and thereby describe molecules, we create languages. Primo Levi, the great writer and chemist, complained in 1984 that there were only three accepted ways to describe a molecule and none of them were very good: the ambiguous molecular formula, the nonlexical chemical graph, and the (often obscure) chemical name. 2 Yet, because these are the ways we describe a molecule’s “constitution”, these dominate our approaches to predicting what a molecule will do. Even SMILES, 3 …