How the character is built
The 钅 radical marks this as a metal, and that is not a coincidence of this one character — it holds right across the table. Read the radical first and the element's state at room temperature is already settled. It is 金 (jīn) squeezed into the space beside another component — radicals change shape by position, which is why 金 is hard to spot until you know to look for 钅.
Read tī in the mainland but tì in Taiwan — one of the few cross-strait tone splits in this range.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Stibnite forms clusters of long metallic-grey needles that are among the most striking mineral specimens anyone can own, and it has been ground into eye paint for at least five thousand years — the Latin name for the mineral is where the symbol Sb comes from. Antimony is one of the few substances that expands slightly as it solidifies, which is why type metal was alloyed with it: the cooling letter pushes into the mould instead of shrinking away from it, giving a sharp face. The richest deposits by far are in Hunan province, where the Xikuangshan field has been the world's principal source for over a century.
Where it sits among the 118
Antimony is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In Chinese history and language
The world's largest antimony deposit sits in Hunan at a place called 锡矿山 Xīkuàngshān, "Tin Ore Mountain", which is the wrong metal entirely. Ming miners working the outcrop in the early sixteenth century found a heavy grey ore and took it for tin; not until the 1890s was it correctly identified as stibnite, antimony sulfide, by which time the name had been in use for close to four hundred years and was immovable. The mountain is still called Tin Ore Mountain and has never produced any tin.
Where it comes from in China
Antimony's centre of gravity is Xikuangshan, near Lengshuijiang in Hunan, the largest antimony deposit known anywhere. The ore is stibnite dropped by warm rather than hot fluids that crept through Late Devonian limestone and black shale and replaced them — part of a broad low-temperature province across southern China that also produced mercury, arsenic and gold. The name reads, character by character, 'tin mine mountain', which is not what came out of it.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锑Antimony in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.