Periodic table nets some zany names

I know very little about science, but I have heard of the periodic table of elements.

Recently, I saw a comic in which one person was showing another person an unexpected item on the periodic table. It was “the element of surprise,” as represented by the emoji for an astonished face.

And for some crazy reason, I found myself wondering whether polonium is named after Shakespeare’s character in “Hamlet,” Polonius. He is the father of Laertes and Ophelia.

This is how I started wondering about how elements got their names.

The periodic table is a chart of all the elements, in order of atomic number and mass.

A Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev decided to organize the elements in the 1860s.

The effort was monumental. Live Science says: “Putting the elements in any kind of order would prove quite difficult. At this time, less than half of the elements were known, and some of these had been given wrong data. It was like working on a really difficult jigsaw puzzle with only half of the pieces and with some of the pieces misshapen.” (See arkansasonline.com/105live.)

The process of naming an element is formal and rigid. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the arbiter of the naming process, says simply, “Elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.” Scientists wo u l d n ’ t dare consider naming an element after oneself. (See arkansasonline.com/105name.)

A scientist can suggest a name, and a division of the international union first accepts an idea, then allows the public to comment for five months. (I emailed the division to ask what some of the public comments were. I haven’t heard back.) The settled choice is published in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry.

For all that ceremony, some element names are just plain boring. Iron, with the symbol Fe for its Latin name ferrum, means gray.

Lithium is from the Greek word for stone.

Bromine, with the symbol Br, comes from the Greek word for stench. This is because bromide smells. (I fear no people were wearing their thinking caps that day.)

Similarly, the metallic element osmium is from the Greek word for smell. (Again, where were the creative namers?)

Helium, which most of us know as the gas that keeps balloons aloft, was named after the Greek word for sun, helios, because the element was first detected during studies of the sun.

Cobalt has a little story. The name for the metallic element comes from the German word for goblin. Apparently, silver miners once believed that these goblins or mischievous elves stole silver and replaced it with cobalt.

Uranium, neptunium and plutonium were named for the planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Timing was key for these element names. Uranus had just been discovered, so the German scientist who found Uranium chose to honor the new planet on the block. Neptunium was named after Neptune, but also it conveniently came immediately after Uranium on the periodic table. And plutonium, named after Pluto, follows uranium.

Krypton is a rare, colorless gas, so it was named for the Greek word for hidden, kryptos. (Crypt, a burial spot often under a church, comes from the same root.) I’m ashamed to say how often I get it confused with Kryptonite, that imaginary substance that makes Superman weak.

The Swedish village of Ytterby, population 2,900, has the distinction of being the source of the names of four elements. Yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium were found in a Ytterby mine. In no other place have so many elements been discovered.

Yttrium, incidentally, helps us get color pictures on our televisions.

Nickel comes from a German word for rascal or demon. The reason is that nickel has a deceptive copper color.

As for mythical names, two make up a family affair. Niobium is named for Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus.

Tantalum is named for Tantalus. The element, the dictionary says, got its name “from its high resistance to absorbing acids, even immersed in them.” King Tantalus was doomed to stand in water that depleted when he tried to drink it, and when he reached for fruit it always moved out of reach. Quite tantalizing.

Niobium is extracted from tantalum.

Einsteinium is named after Albert Einstein. Fermium is named for Enrico Fermi. The dictionary says both are synthetic transuranic metallic elements. I know the meanings of synthetic and metallic. Transuranic means having an atomic number greater than 92. Well, that really clears up my confusion.

The four most recently named elements are nihonium (for Japan), moscovium (for Moscow), tennessine (for Tennessee) and oganesson (for Russian nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian). All these elements are artificially produced. That sounds like cheating to me.

Polonium, by the way, is named after Poland. Marie Curie, who identified the element with her husband, Pierre, was Polish.

Mendeleev, the table’s creator, has mendelevium named after him. Turns out he’s also a transuranic element.