Trivial name
Names can be based on a property of the chemical, including appearance (color, taste or smell), consistency, and crystal structure; a place where it was found or where the discoverer comes from; the name of a scientist; a mythological figure; an astronomical body; the shape of the molecule; and even fictional figures.
In scientific documents, international treaties, patents and legal definitions, names for chemicals are needed that identify them unambiguously.
[1] Nine elements were known by the Middle Ages: gold, silver, tin, mercury, copper, lead, iron, sulfur, and carbon.
[4] Systematic nomenclature began after Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau stated the need for "a constant method of denomination, which helps the intelligence and relieves the memory".
[6] The other noble gases are neon ("new"), argon ("slow, lazy"), krypton ("hidden"), xenon ("stranger"), and radon ("from radium").
Elements have been named for celestial bodies (helium, selenium, tellurium, for the Sun, Moon, and Earth; cerium and palladium for Ceres and Pallas, two asteroids).
They have been named for mythological figures, including Titans in general (titanium) and Prometheus in particular (promethium); Roman and Greek gods (uranium, neptunium, and plutonium) and their descendants (tantalum for Tantalus, a son of Zeus, and niobium for Niobe, a daughter of Tantalus); and Norse deities (vanadium for the goddess Vanadis and thorium for the god Thor).
In particular, technetium and promethium were so named because the first samples detected were artificially synthesised; neither of the two has any isotope sufficiently stable to occur in nature on Earth in significant quantities.
Four elements — terbium, erbium, ytterbium, and yttrium — were named after the Swedish village Ytterby, where ores containing them were extracted.
[4] Other elements named after places are magnesium (after Magnesia), strontium, scandium, europium, thulium (after an old Roman name for an unidentified northern region), holmium, copper (derived from Cyprus, where it was mined in the Roman era), hafnium, rhenium, americium, berkelium, californium, and darmstadtium.
Among the transuranium elements, this restriction was relaxed; there followed curium (after the Curies), einsteinium (Albert Einstein), fermium (Enrico Fermi), mendelevium (Dmitri Mendeleev), nobelium (Alfred Nobel) and lawrencium (Ernest Lawrence).
The first scientist or laboratory to isolate an element has the right to propose a name; after a review process, a final decision is made by the IUPAC Council.
In keeping with tradition, names can be based on a mythological concept or character, astronomical object, mineral, place, property of the element or scientist.
[11] Russian names for hydrogen, oxygen and carbon are vodorod, kislorod and uglerod (generating water, acid and coal respectively).
In addition, chemicals were named after the consistency, crystalline form, a person or place, its putative medical properties or method of preparation.
Ammonium (with the little-used systematic name azanium[14]) was first extracted from sal ammoniac, meaning "salt of Amun".
[13]: 65–66 Many more names were based on color; for example, hematite, orpiment, and verdigris come from words meaning "blood-like stone", "gold pigment", and "green of Greece".
The latter was the basis of the dihydrogen monoxide hoax, a document that was circulated warning readers of the dangers of the chemical (for example, it is fatal if inhaled).
The authors named the complex (and one of its components, bohemamine) after the opera La bohème by Puccini, and the remaining components were named after characters in the opera: alcindoromycin (Alcindoro), collinemycin (Colline), marcellomycin (Marcello), mimimycin (Mimi), musettamycin (Musetta), rudolphomycin (Rodolfo) and schaunardimycin (Schaunard).
[23] A research lab at Lepetit Pharmaceuticals, led by Piero Sensi, was fond of coining nicknames for chemicals that they discovered, later converting them to a form more acceptable for publication.
