Chemical Symbols That Look Nothing Like Their Element
Why gold is Au, lead is Pb and tungsten is W. Eleven elements whose symbols come from older names, plus the full table of the ones worth memorising.
Most chemical symbols are obvious once you see them. Oxygen is O, carbon is C, calcium is Ca. Then there is a group of eleven whose symbols appear to have nothing to do with their English names at all — and those are precisely the ones that turn up in quizzes.
The reason is simple: the symbols were set using Latin, and in one case German, rather than English.
The eleven oddities
| Element | Symbol | Comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Gold | Au | Aurum, Latin for gold |
| Silver | Ag | Argentum |
| Iron | Fe | Ferrum |
| Copper | Cu | Cuprum, from Cyprus |
| Lead | Pb | Plumbum — the root of "plumber" |
| Tin | Sn | Stannum |
| Mercury | Hg | Hydrargyrum, "water silver" |
| Sodium | Na | Natrium |
| Potassium | K | Kalium |
| Antimony | Sb | Stibium |
| Tungsten | W | Wolfram, from German |
The story behind three of them
Lead and plumbing. Roman water pipes were made of lead, so the people who fitted them were plumbarii. The pipes are long gone and the job name survived.
Copper and Cyprus. The island was the Roman world’s main source of copper, and the metal was called aes cyprium, "metal of Cyprus", shortened to cuprum.
Tungsten and wolfram. Tungsten is Swedish for "heavy stone". German miners called its ore wolfram, said to be because it ate through tin like a wolf. English took the Swedish name, the symbol took the German one, and the element has been answering to both ever since.
Other symbols worth knowing
H hydrogen, He helium, Li lithium, C carbon, N nitrogen, O oxygen, F fluorine, Ne neon, Mg magnesium, Al aluminium, Si silicon, P phosphorus, S sulfur, Cl chlorine, Ar argon, Ca calcium, Ti titanium, Cr chromium, Mn manganese, Co cobalt, Ni nickel, Zn zinc, Br bromine, Kr krypton, Ag silver, I iodine, Xe xenon, Pt platinum, U uranium.
For crossword solvers
Setters use chemical symbols as hidden letter fragments all the time. "Gold" in a cryptic clue very often means you should write AU or OR (the heraldic term). "Iron" means FE, "silver" means AG, "tin" means SN, and "lead" can mean PB or simply the first letter of the following word.