Silicate glasses are important cultural, societal and geological materials. Geologic glasses testify for the igneous activity of the Earth and, for instance, represented important source of tools and ornamental objects during the Paleolithic. Nowadays, silicate glasses are used to build technical materials, such as smartphone screens or glass matrix for stabilizing hazardous radioactive wastes. Therefore, silicate glasses are central to the history of the Earth and of the humanity. The compositional landscape of natural and industrial silicate glasses is vast, with various elements that all influence differently the glass properties and structure. The SiO 4 tetrahedral framework, backbone of silicate glasses, is variously influenced by the introduction of network modifier metal cations or network former aluminium cations. Industrial and geologic silicate glasses further contain multivalent elements (e.g., Fe 2+/3+), rare-earth elements, and volatile elements (H, C, S, Cl, F, I) that play different roles on the glass structure and properties. This chapter proposes to review the link between the structure, the properties and the chemical composition of silicate glasses.