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41 of the 118 known elements have names associated with, or specifically named for, places around the world or among astronomical objects. 32 of these have names tied to the places on Earth, and the other nine are named after to Solar System objects: helium for the Sun; tellurium for the Earth; selenium for the Moon; mercury (indirectly), uranium, neptunium and plutonium after their respective ...
The first letter is always capitalized. While the symbol is often a contraction of the element's name, it may sometimes not match the element's English name; for example, "Pb" for lead (from Latin plumbum) or "W" for tungsten (from German Wolfram). Elements which have only temporary systematic names are given temporary three-letter symbols (e.g ...
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Ancient cultures in Greece , Angola , Tibet , India , and Mali had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind ...
Planetary names and symbols for the metals – the seven planets and seven metals known since Classical times in Europe and the Mideast – was ubiquitous in alchemy. The association of what are anachronistically known as planetary metals started breaking down with the discovery of antimony, bismuth and zinc in the 16th century. Alchemists ...
The s- and p-block elements, which fill their outer shells, are called main-group elements; the d-block elements (coloured blue below), which fill an inner shell, are called transition elements (or transition metals, since they are all metals). [61] The next 18 elements fill the 5s orbitals (rubidium and strontium), then 4d (yttrium through ...
The chemical abbreviation for sodium was first published in 1814 by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in his system of atomic symbols, [46] [47] and is an abbreviation of the element's Neo-Latin name natrium, which refers to the Egyptian natron, [42] a natural mineral salt mainly consisting of hydrated sodium carbonate. Natron historically had several ...
[26] [27] [d] Some rarer metals are denser: tungsten and gold are both at 19.3 g/cm 3, and osmium—the densest metal known—has a density of 22.59 g/cm 3, almost twice that of lead. [28] Lead is a very soft metal with a Mohs hardness of 1.5; it can be scratched with a fingernail. [29] It is quite malleable and somewhat ductile.