Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Uranium
/jʊˈreɪniəm/noun
The heavy radioactive metal used as nuclear fuel and in weapons.
The Greek roots
Οὐρανός
Ouranós
sky, the sky god
Literally: “belonging to the sky god”
Follow a root:Οὐρανός3 words
The story of the word
Martin Heinrich Klaproth identified the new element in pitchblende in 1789 and named it for the planet Uranus, which Herschel had found eight years earlier. The planet carries Οὐρανός, the sky god whom Hesiod has castrated by his own son Kronos. Klaproth set a pattern the table kept: neptunium and plutonium were later named in planetary order, one step further out each time.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1789
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
Uranusuranography
In a sentence
Enriching uranium is the expensive part of building a reactor.
Depleted uranium is dense enough to be used as ballast.