yuánzì Chinese characters of the chemical elements
氙

Xenon Xe · 54

xiān

gas · period 5, group 18 · p-block

Anatomy

气 radical 气 qì
gas → gas
+ 山 phonetic
from xenon =
氙 xiān

Transliteration. The phonetic half approximates the international name. Xenon

History of the character

Every form found in the sources, from the first missionary chemistry books of the 1850s to the current standards. Hover a dot for the source. Simplified 氙, traditional 氙.

1850187519001925195019752000antiquitytoday
氙 xiān
1933 · 化學命名原則 · Principles of Chemical Nomenclature (1933) — Zhèng Zhènwén (鄭貞文), National Institute for Compilation and Translation Inferred: known by 1933, when the Principles fixed one character per element, and no later change is recorded.
  1. 1933 氙 xiān 化學命名原則 Principles of Chemical Nomenclature, Zhèng Zhènwén (鄭貞文), National Institute for Compilation and Translationinferred Inferred: known by 1933, when the Principles fixed one character per element, and no later change is recorded.

Homophones

No other element shares this syllable.

Elsewhere

Japanese キセノン Korean 제논 Vietnamese xenon

Western name from Greek ξένος (xenos), “foreign”. Compare all

Unicode

U+6C19 in CJK Unified Ideographs