Element Names

People often ask why chemical elements are represented by the symbols they have been given. Some are obvious; H, C, N and O could only really be hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Similarly, Zn is fairly obvious as zinc, Ar is clearly argon and Es makes sense as Einsteinium (once you know that name exists). But what about Ag for silver, Na for sodium and W for tungsten?

Many of the chemical symbols that don’t make sense in English can be traced to a mixture of other languages. It turns out that Ag comes from argentum, which is latin for silver; Na is from natrium and W stands for wolfram. The letters make sense but where do the words come from?

Argentum gave Argentina its name (as a major source of the world’s silver) and also gives the word for money in French, l’argent. This is because silver was, for a long time, a popular coinage metal.

Natrium means soda and also has a geographical connection, in this case with the Natron Valley in Egypt, where receding flood waters from the River Nile left behind crystals of what we now call sodium carbonate. There is also a separate latin word, sodanum, which is the name of a plant species. The ashes of the plant, after it has been burned, can be used to make what we call soda glass and it was the chemist Humphrey Davy who coined the name sodium after electrolysing soda. (It also happens that the same plant species provides an extract that can be used to cure headaches – and there is an Arabic word, suda, meaning headache, that links back to the geographical Egyptian connection.)

Incidentally… In the same year that he identified sodium, 1807, Davy also electrolysed potash (another combustion residue) to discover potassium, which has the chemical symbol K. You might guess that, like sodium, this is due to a latin connection; kalium being the latin word for potash. If you know your chemistry then you will recall that both sodium and potassium are alkali metals (because their oxides are soluble in water, giving alkaline solutions) and it is likely that the word alkali comes from kalium for this reason.

Then we have wolfram, which is a German word linked directly to wolves. One explanation says that tungsten was first met as an impurity in other metal ores that caused a lot of slag to form (slag is a waste material that floats on the surface of molten metals). The metalworkers thought the impurity was “devouring” the other metals, like a wolf devours its prey. Another explanation originates from the very high melting point of tungsten, which means it can become white hot when heated fiercely. The whiteness gives a moon-like glow, and the full moon is associated with wolf-like behaviour. So that gave two reasons for tungsten to become known as “the wolf element” – or wolfram. The word tungsten itself come from the Swedish words tung sten, which mean heavy stone and recognise the the high density (“heaviness”) of wolframite.

None of this will be in any exam that you are ever likely to sit but it is knowledge that provides an interesting background the the elements that we talk about every day in science lessons. If you want to find out more then I highly recommend The Periodic Table: A Field Guide to the Elements by Paul parsons and Gail Dixon (priced at £10 or less). For a much briefer summary, and without any pictures, you can click here to download a one-sentence taster for each element. This information comes from the appendix of Introduction to Radiation Protection by Claus Grupen, which can be downloaded in full from the CERN website here.