Chinese Chinese Character

Periodic table (Chinese) Wikipedia

Below is a periodic table using Chinese language|Chinese Chinese character|characters as symbols for chemical elements. Most of those symbols have been created in the 19th century|19th and 20th century|20th centuries for the specific purpose of representing chemical elements.

Chinese is the only language that uses characters instead of the usual one or two letter abbreviations for elements. These characters specially-invented for the periodic table are not used in Japan or Korea even though the Japanese language|Japanese and Korean language|Korean languages also use Chinese characters.

All symbols for metals (except Hg) contain the Radical (Chinese character)|radical 钅 or 金 ("gold"), for solid nonmetals 石 ("stone"), for liquid elements 水 ("water"), and for gases 气 ("steam"), in reference to their usual states at room temperature and standard pressure.

As of 2004, most characters for elements with atomic numbers 104 and above have not been established in Unicode, and therefore are not presented in the tables below. However, finalized phonetic components have been suggested for elements 104-110, so these phonetic components do appear in the tables below.

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.

Last Modified:   2005-02-27