zinc

Zinc is a chemical element with atomic number 30 and the symbol Zn. It is a brittle metal at room temperature with a shiny, gray color. Trace amounts of zinc are essential for life as we know it, and the metal is used in a wide variety of alloys.

The name comes from the German zink, but the origin of the German word is unknown. It is first recorded in the form zinken, which might be a compound of zinn (tin) + -ken (diminutive suffix), with a meaning of tin-like metal.

Zinc was known to the ancients, primarily in ores and alloys, but it was the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim), c. 1493–1541) who first identified it as a distinct metal and recorded the name zinc in his Liber Mineralium II:

Moreover there is another metal generally unknown called zinken. It is of peculiar nature and origin; many other metals adulterate it. It can be melted, for it is generated from three fluid principles; it is not malleable. Its color is different from other metals and does not resemble other others in its growth. Its ultimate matter is not to me yet fully known. It admits no mixture and does not permit fabricationes of other metals. It stands alone entirely to itself.

Georgius Agricola also recorded the name in the 1558 edition of his Bermannus:

Eius magna copia Reichesteini, quod est in Silesia, unde mihi nuper allatum est, effoditur, multo etiam maior Raurisi misti, quod zincum nominant.

(A great quantity [of pyrite] is dug in Reichenstein, which is in Silesia, as was recently reported to me, and a much greater quantity of the Raurici alloy, which they call zinc.)

The earliest known English language use of the name is in John French’s 1651 The Art of Distillation:

About the third part of the spirit of Salt cometh over as insipid as common water, though the spirit were well rectified before, for the driness of the Lapis Calaminaris (which is the driest of all Minerals and Metals except Zink) retaineth the spirit after the flegm is come over.

Sources:

Agricola, Georgius. Bermannus. Basel: Johann Froben and Niclausen Bischoff, 1558, 431–62. ProQuest Early European Books.

———. De re metallica. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, trans. London: Mining Magazine, 1912, 409n. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Yes, that Herbert Clark Hoover.)

French, John. The Art of Distillation, second edition. London: E. Cotes for Thomas Williams, 1653, 78. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, zinc, n.

Wothers, Peter. Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019, 58. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) license.