The chemical symbol for oxygen is O. Makes good sense . Calcium gets repped by a Ca . Sounds near . Hydrogen ? H. Cobalt ? Co. Lithium ? Li . With you so far . Lead ? Pb .
halt the presses !
There ’s noporbin lead-in . Nohorgin mercury . Noforein iron . Nowin tungsten . What ’s go on here ? It seem like chemist were maybe under the influence of a niggling C2H5OH when they came up with these symbolization .
There are actually a few things that help oneself explain the dissonance between elements ’ epithet and their symbol , says Sam Kean , writer ofThe Disappearing Spoonand occasionalMental_Flosscontributor .
“ One answer lies in the cosmopolitan nature of the periodical mesa , ” KeanwroteatSlatea few years ago . The chemical substance elements were break and/or isolated by scientists all over Europe and elsewhere in the world . Sometimes these events were n’t recorded ( as with gold or branding iron , which were sleep together by ancient civilizations and have n’t been credit to a individual discoverer ) , or they happened independently in more than one place , and it ’s not open who did it first . As such , says Kean , “ the same substance might go by different figure in unlike places for decades . ”
In the liveliness of compromise , an element ’s name might come from one language , and its symbol from another . That ’s the fount with tungsten . Its symbol is W , says Kean , “ because the Germans call the factor ‘ wolfram . ’ It was a via media between different countries ’ claims . ”
Other name - symbolic representation mismatch came about from scientists thread on research from classical texts write in Arabic , Greek , and Latin , and from the habit of “ gentleman scientists ” of bygone earned run average using a mixture of the latter two speech as “ a coarse language for men of letter . ” The Hg symbolisation for quicksilver , for example , descend from the Latinhydragyrum , which mean “ water silver , ” and lead ’s Pb symbol hail from its Romance name , plumbum .
