Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Chrome
/kroʊm/noun
Chromium, or the bright metallic plating made from it.
The Greek roots
χρῶμα
chrôma
colour, complexion
Literally: “colour”
Follow a root:χρῶμα11 words
The story of the word
Vauquelin's new metal was named chromium around 1797 because its compounds come out red, orange, green and yellow with almost nothing dull in between. Chrome yellow was a painter's pigment on canvases long before chrome was a finish on a bumper, and the plating sense grew out of the pigment name. Chrôma also gives chromatic, achromatic, and chromosome, which means coloured body and was so named because the structure soaked up laboratory dye.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1800
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
chromaticchromosomemonochromepolychrome
In a sentence
The bike is all chrome and rust in roughly equal measure.
Chrome yellow darkens over time, which is one reason those sunflowers look different now.