yuánzì Chinese characters of the chemical elements

About 元字

元字 yuánzì, “element characters”, is a companion to the paper Architecture of Chinese chemical element names by Stefan Gugler, Yiyang Cui and Pavlo O. Dral, ChemTexts 12, 11 (2026). The characters, radicals, phonetic components, readings and origin notes for all 118 elements come from that paper's tables.

The idea and the shape of the site are borrowed from Guzi, Adrian Hill's explorer of Andreas Guder's character etymographies: a small, installable app in which every character has a page, search works across scripts and readings, and the data is the point.

What is in the data

  • Elements: the 118 current characters, decomposed into radical and phonetic.
  • Phonetics: the 117 borrowed components, their own readings and meanings from the Unicode Unihan database, and which syllable of the international name each one echoes.
  • History timelines on each element page: every earlier form found in the sources, from Hobson's 養氣 of 1849 to the 2017 characters, with links to digitised copies where they exist.
  • Timeline: the story of the naming system and the people who argued over it.
  • Languages: Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese names from Wikidata next to the Chinese ones, and the Western etymology from Wikipedia's list of element name etymologies.
  • Compounds: how a binary formula is read today and how it was written in 1871.

Sources beyond the paper

  • 劉廣定, 中文化學名詞的演變 (上), 科學月刊, October 1985.
  • 何涓, 益智書會與杜亞泉的中文無機物命名方案, 2010, for the 1901 Educational Association list and Dù Yàquán's 1905 periodic table.
  • Chinese Wikipedia, 化学元素的中文命名法 and the individual element articles; Japanese Wikipedia, 元素の中国語名称.
  • Hao Chang, Getting to the heart of the matter, 2015; Qiao and Wang, The diachronic evolution of Chinese terms for chemical elements, 2022.
  • Unicode Unihan database; Wikidata; Wikipedia, List of chemical element name etymologies.

Caveats

Dates of undated proposals are estimates placed just before the form that replaced them. Two tones differ from the paper's table and follow standard dictionaries (鈹 pí, 鋦 jú). Nine characters for elements 104–116 lie outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and are drawn from outlines; older forms in the same situation show their composition instead.

Code

A SvelteKit app, prerendered to static files and served next to the Hugo site at sgugler.ch. Source and data are in the site repository.