The Chinese characters for chemical elements are the last characters that were officially created and recognized in the Chinese-speaking world. These characters are contrasted to those that are constantly being coined for dialectal usage.

Some chemical elements, including gold (金), silver (銀), copper (銅), iron (鐵), lead (鉛), tin (錫), and mercury (汞), did not require new characters at all, as they were well known before the conception of modern chemistry and atomic theory.

New characters were made for those that did not have their characters. Most of these characters were coined in the way that each contains two parts:

1. The "semantic part" refers to its usual state at room temperature and standard pressure. Metals (except mercury) contain the radical 钅 or 金 jīn ("gold"); for solid nonmetals 石 shí ("stone"); for liquid elements 水 or シ shuǐ ("water"); and for gases 气 qì ("steam").
2. The "phonetic part" represents a partial transliteration of the element. For example, 氦 (helium) contains the "phonetic part" 亥 (haì).

A few characters, though, are not "semantic-phonetic", but are "semantic-semantic". They also comprise of two parts, one referring to their state at room temperature and standard pressure, another being descriptive of their properties. These include:

• 氧 (oxygen): the part 羊 is the short form for 養 (to feed, maintain), as oxygen is the gas for human survival.
• 氫 (hydrogen): the part 巠 is the short form for 輕 (light in weight).
• 氯 (chlorine): the part 彔 is the short form for 綠 (green).

Note that some of those "new characters" are not indeed new: they are instead archaic characters, whose original meanings have been obscure for long, such as 鏷 (Protactinium), 鈹 (Beryllium) and 鉻 (Chromium).

Most elements have the same name in Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese but use a different variant of the same base character. The exceptions are the transuranium elements; as most of these elements were discovered after the establishment of People's Republic of China in 1949, they have been given different names in Traditional and Simplified Chinese as the former is still used in the Republic of China while the latter has been adopted by the People's Republic of China.

Traditional characters for elements with atomic numbers 104 and above were only added in Unicode 3.1 (2001) as surrogate pairs that are part of the CJK Ideographs Extension B character set; many operating systems and web browsers do not support the display of surrogate pair characters. They are thus displayed twice in the traditional characters table below, as both the surrogate pair characters themselves and as combinations of phonetic components. Simplified characters for elements 104 and above have not been encoded as of Unicode 4.1 (2005) and are thus given only as combinations of phonetic components in the simplified characters table below.

Legend

Color coding for atomic numbers:

• Elements numbered in blue are liquids at room temperature;
• those in green are gases at room temperature;
• those in black are solid at room temperature;
• those in red are synthetic and do not occur naturally (all are solid at room temperature).
• those in gray have not yet been discovered (they also have muted fill colors indicating the likely chemical series they would fall under).

Simplified Chinese

Periodic Table Chinese GB.png

Traditional Chinese

Periodic Table Chinese Big5.png

External links

• http://www.limestone.on.ca/ibuild/davies/chinesept.html - periodic table in Simplified Chinese
• http://www.jergym.hiedu.cz/~canovm/vyhledav/varian20/cina.html - periodic table in Traditional Chinese

Chinese language | Periodic table