Nanocrystals of ZnO have been produced by an alkoxide based synthesis involving diethylzinc, tert-butyl alcohol, ethanol, and water. The resulting ZnO is in the form of a powder made up of zincite crystallites in the size range of 3-5 nm. These crystallites aggregate together to form larger spherical particles. These spherical particles have been studied by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET) methods and were found to contain many poses and tunnels. IL is because of this that an uncharacteristically high surface area is found, averaging about 120 m(2)/g. As seen with other metal oxides, once they are made as nanoparticles, their reactivity is greatly enhanced. This is thought to be due to morphological differences, whereas larger crystallites have only a small percentage of reactive sites on the surface, smaller crystallites will possess much higher surface concentration of such sites, Elemental analysis, X-ray diffraction, and infrared spectroscopy have been used to characterize this nanoparticle ZnO, and reactions with CCl4, SO2, and paraoxon have demonstrated significantly enhanced reactivity and/or capacity compared with common forms of ZnO powders.