Myth & LegendGreek → English
Iridium
/ɪˈrɪdiəm/noun
A very hard, very dense platinum-group metal, element 77.
The Greek roots
Ἶρις
Îris
rainbow, rainbow goddess
Literally: “rainbow metal”
Follow a root:ἶρις2 words
The story of the word
Smithson Tennant found it in 1803 in the black sludge left when crude platinum was dissolved in aqua regia, and published the name in 1804 after Ἶρις, the rainbow who ran messages between the gods and the world. The reason was strictly chemical: the salts come out red, yellow, blue and violet from the same metal. Iridium is also the metal in the thin clay layer at the end of the Cretaceous, the anomaly that pointed Luis and Walter Alvarez toward an asteroid.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1804
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
irisiridescentiridology
In a sentence
The spark plug electrodes are tipped with iridium so they survive the heat.