High Temperature Kinetics / Gas-phase / Molecularity / Metal Atoms / Metal Oxidation / Rate Coefficients / Activation Energies / Sb / As / O 2 / SbO Bond EnergyExamples of reactions which are termolecular near room temperature and gradually switch over to complex-forming bimolecular reactions with increasing temperature are discussed. The Sb/O2 system, which is known from D. Husain's work to be termolecular at 300 K, has been studied here from 1165Ϫ1495 K at 12 to 52 mbar in a high-temperature fast-flow reactor (HTFFR). Sb was vaporized from a crucible and atomic resonance absorption spectrometry was used to measure the rates of Sb consumption. Under these conditions the reaction, identified as Sb ϩ O2 → SbO ϩ O, is pressure-independent with k(T) ϭ 6.3 ϫ10 Ϫ11 exp (Ϫ 9107 K/T) cm 3 molecule Ϫ1 s Ϫ1 . The 2σ precision limits are Ϯ 8% and the corresponding estimated accuracy limits are Ϯ 24%. The results suggest that D 0 (Sb-O) ϭ 444 Ϯ 28 kJ mol Ϫ1 . The results are compared to those of other endothermic metal-atom O 2 abstraction reactions, all of which have pre-exponentials on the order of 10 Ϫ10 cm 3 molecule Ϫ1 s Ϫ1 and activation energies for abstraction close to the endothermicity. This allows assessments of the relative importance of bi-, and ter-molecular kinetics, as illustrated for As ϩ O2.