Why Are Some Periodic Table Symbols Unrelated to Their Names?

Some periodic table symbols do not relate to their English names because older, traditional, or non-English root words, mostly in Latin or German, influence them. The etymology of element names can take you on a fantastic adventure, and you might be surprised by where you end up.

As scientists discovered and/or isolated most of the chemical elements all over Europe and elsewhere in the world, they sometimes did not record these events (as with gold or iron, which ancient civilizations knew and haven’t credited to a single discoverer).

They happened independently in more than one place, making it unclear who did it first. As such, different names for the same substance might exist in different places for decades.

Other name-symbol mismatches arose from scientists drawing on research from classical texts written in Arabic, Greek, and Latin, and from the habit of “gentleman scientists” of bygone eras using a mix of the latter two languages as “a common language for men of letters.”

Eleven elements appear in the periodic table with letters or symbols not aligning with their names:

Sodium (Na – Natrium), Potassium (K – Kalium), Iron (Fe – Ferrum), Copper (Cu – Cuprum), Silver (Ag – Argentum), Tin (Sn – Stannum), Antimony (Sb – Stibium), Tungsten (W – Wolfram), Gold (Au – Aurum), Mercury (Hg – Hydrargyrum), Lead (Pb – Plumbum).

Nearly all of these elements were known in ancient times and therefore retained their Latin names. Some of the names also led to other words that are common in the English language. For example, plumbum, Latin for Lead (Pb), gives us the words plumber and plumbing because people used lead in water supply pipes for centuries.

Other names have different origins. For instance, hydrargyrum, the Latin name for Mercury (Hg), derives from the original Greek hydrargyros, which meant “water silver.” Historically known as “quicksilver,” elemental mercury is a shiny silver metal that remains liquid at room temperature.

Tungsten derives its W symbol from its German name Wolfram. Wolfram comes from wolframite, which was one of the ores where miners most often found tungsten. The name Tungsten itself originates from Swedish and translates into English as “heavy stone.”

The word potassium stems from the English “pot ash,” which people used to isolate potassium salts. We get K from the name kalium, given by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth, which stems from alkali, which stems from the Arabic al-qalyah, or “plant ashes.”

Content for this question contributed by Harry Santillo, resident of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USA