Talk:List of chemical element name etymologies
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This page was easier to find via google than through wikipedia's internal search. Perhaps integrating into another page and other pages would be a good thing:
[edit] Room for improvement
This page seems to be more about the circumstances of the discovery of an element than the origins of its name.
- "Actinium" apparently comes from "beam" or "ray", but why? Does actinium have something to do with light?
- "Aluminium" from "alum": why? Trawling the article aluminum, I find the sentence "In 1808, Humphry Davy identified the existence of a metal base of alum, which he at first named alumium and later aluminum ." That's what should be here.
- "Americium" doesn't even say that it's from "America" (State the Obvious), much less why that name was chosen (a burst of WWII patriotism?)
Maybe this list should be moved to "List of circumstances of discovery of chemical elements" and start a new "List of chemical element name etymologies". jnestorius(talk) 23:20, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
- The version I heard was that Americium was chosen because it is under Europium in the periodic table (well, and probably a bit of nationalism as well...). Itub 18:46, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
