How the character is built
The 石 radical marks this as a solid non-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.
Where you actually meet it
砷中毒 (shēn zhòngdú) arsenic poisoning
The element itself
Arsenic minerals are much prettier than their reputation: realgar is a deep red and orpiment a brilliant lemon yellow, both used as pigments before their nature was understood. The metal itself is a by-product nobody asks for, driven off as a vapour when copper and gold ores are roasted and captured because it cannot be released. Its most consequential geology is subtle — in the great river deltas of South Asia, sediment carrying trace arsenic sits in aquifers where the chemistry releases it into groundwater, which is why well water there has to be tested rather than assumed clean.
Where it sits among the 118
Arsenic is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In living things
Arsenic's toxicity is really two different stories with one name. Arsenate is a near-perfect impostor of phosphate — enzymes accept it, build it into esters and ATP analogues, and those products fall apart in water, so the cell's phosphate chemistry quietly runs down without ever quite failing. Arsenite behaves nothing like that: it seeks out pairs of sulfur atoms and clamps onto them, jamming thiol-dependent enzymes such as the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex that feeds the citric acid cycle. A third form makes the point about chemistry mattering more than the element — arsenobetaine, the organic arsenic abundant in seafood, passes through the body essentially untouched.
In Chinese history and language
雄黄 xiónghuáng, realgar, is an orange-red arsenic sulfide that was ground into wine and drunk at 端午节 Duānwǔjié, the Dragon Boat Festival, in the belief that it drove off snakes, insects and pestilence at the season when all three were worst. It turns the hinge of one of China's best-loved stories: in the Legend of the White Snake, Bai Suzhen is coaxed into drinking realgar wine and loses her human form in front of her husband. Modern celebrations have kept the symbolism — the character 王 daubed on a child's forehead in realgar paste — and quietly dropped the drinking, arsenic being what it is.
Where it comes from in China
Arsenic in China points to Shimen in northern Hunan, the largest realgar deposit in Asia, where orange-red realgar and golden orpiment fill Cambrian carbonate rock. It was worked for something like fifteen hundred years, largely for the realgar itself, which had a fixed place in traditional practice and in Dragon Boat Festival custom. Mining has now ended, and the site is better known for the cleanup it left behind than for what it produced.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
砷Arsenic in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 石, and every one is a solid non-metal.