Names Of Elements

A slightly different English Corner this time, where we look at a type of name rather than a specific phrase. The Periodic Table, or table of elements, is a chart that organizes all known chemical elements by their atomic number, with rows called periods and columns called groups. This arrangement is based on the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus and reveals periodic trends in the elements’ properties. Each element is represented by a symbol and includes its atomic number, name, and atomic mass. So how do these elements get their names?

As there are currently 118 elements (94 naturally occurring, 24 man made) we will only cover a few in this article. Some of the man made ones are distinctly prosaic and are effectively the same as numbers – the series of man-made elements with atomic weights from 113 to 118 are named ununtrium, ununquadium, ununpentium, ununhexium, ununseptium, ununoctium and are hybrids concocted from the Latin unus (“one”), various Greek numbers and the standard Latinate suffix –ium. These mind-numbingly unimaginative names therefore mean “one-one-three-ium,” “one-one-four-ium,” “one-one-five-ium,” etc.

There are some states, too: rhenium (from the Rheinland, Germany), hassium (from Latin for the German state name Hessen) and californium (do we have to spell it out?). We might also have had alabamium and illinium (for Alabama and Illinois) if scientists hadn’t decided to call them astatine (from Greek for “unstable”) and promethium (from Prometheus*), instead.

Then there are the cities. Magnesium is from Magnesia in ancient Greece, thulium, found in Sweden, was named after Thule, a mythical land in the far north, thought by some today to actually have been Trondheim. Hafnium and holmium take their names from Hafnia and Holmia, medieval Latin for Copenhagen and Stockholm, respectively. Paris is represented by lutetium (from Latin Lutetia, the name of an ancient city on the site of modern Paris). 

And who would have guessed that strontium (above) is named for a village in Argyllshire, Scotland?  That village is called Strontian, where a strontium compound was found in a lead mine. Surprisingly, the place with the most elements to its name is a small town in Sweden – Ytterby has given us ytterbium , yttrium and terbium.

It seems only logical to name an element after one of its distinctive properties. The dense element tungsten has a nice, straightforward descriptive name. It means “heavy stone” in Swedish (tung “heavy” + sten ”stone”). (see image below)

Elements come in many colors, hence we have chlorine (Greek chloros, “yellowish-green”), cesium (Latin caesius, “sky-blue”), and indium because it’s indigo blue. But what’s up with chromium? It’s from the Greek chroma, “color.” Sure, it’s got a color but which one (it is actually named thus because its compounds come in several different colors)? We might raise a similar objection to osmium, from Greek osme (“odor”) . Is it, for instance a pleasant odor or foul (Smithson Tennant, who named this element, characterized the odor as “pungent and peculiar”)? No such question arises with bromine. It is from the Greek bromos, “stench”.

*We propose, therefore, the name ‘prometheum’ (symbol Pm) for element 61 after Prometheus,..who stole fire from heaven for the use of mankind… This name…symbolizes the dramatic way in which the element may be produced in quantity as a result of man’s harnessing of the energy of nuclear fission.”  From Chemical & Engineering News, August 9, 1948, Jacob A. Marinsky and Lawrence E. Glendenin (via the OED).

Thanks to the (now defunct) website Take Our Word For It for providing the above, adapted slightly by us.

Main image attribution Dmarcus100, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons