tungsten

Etymology

It is borrowed from Swedish tungsten (“scheelite, calcium tungstate”),^[2][3][4][5] from tung (“heavy”) and sten (“stone”), "heavy stone".^{[2][3][4][6][7][8]} Barnhart and Klein say that it was coined by its discoverer, the Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele;^[4][9] Etymonline and Klein date the coinage to 1780,^[3][9] although the OED records the word in English in 1770.^[2] The Swedish adjective is related to Old Norse þungr (“heavy”),^[6][10][7] and the noun to steinn and to stone.^[6][10][7]

Earliest recorded meaning

Native calcium tungstate, the mineral now called scheelite: 1770, in Engeström and da Costa's translation of a Swedish work on mineralogy.^[2] Etymonline also notes this earlier use for calcium tungstate.^[3]

Semantic evolution

The name of the mineral was transferred to the heavy grey metal contained in it, recorded in English from 1796, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society;^[2][3] it was formerly also written in the Latin form tungstenum, like other names of metals.^[2] The mineral sense was obsolete by 1822.^[2][5]

Timeline

• 1770 – calcium tungstate, scheelite (obsolete by 1822).^[2]
• 1796 – the metallic element.^[2][3]

Meanings

Noun

1. A hard, heavy, grey-white metallic chemical element with a very high melting point, found in scheelite and wolframite and used in lamp filaments, alloys and high-speed cutting tools, with the symbol W and atomic number 74, also called wolfram.^{[11][10][5][12]}
2. (obsolete, 1770–1822) Scheelite, native calcium tungstate.^[2][5]

Word family

• tungstenic
• ferrotungsten
• tungstic
• tungstite
• tungsten carbide
• tungsten lamp
• tungsten trioxide

Related words

• tungstate
• stone
• wolfram
• scheelite

Usage notes

The element's symbol W comes from New Latin wolframium, from German Wolfram (“iron tungstate”), the source of wolfram.^[3]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b c d Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b c The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
7. ^ a b c Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
8. ^ The Chambers Dictionary (2014), 13th ed., Edinburgh: Chambers
9. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
10. ^ a b c Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
11. ^ Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
12. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House