How the character is built
The 氵 radical marks this as a liquid, 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 水 (shuǐ) squeezed into the space beside another component — radicals change shape by position, which is why 水 is hard to spot until you know to look for 氵.
氵 'water' plus 臭 'stink', calquing Greek brômos 'stench' — and the only liquid 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
Bromine is one of only two elements that are liquid at ordinary temperature, a dense reddish-brown fluid that gives off a choking vapour — its name comes from the Greek for stench. It is far too reactive to occur free, and comes from brine: the Dead Sea, which is bromide-rich beyond anywhere else, and deep underground brines trapped in sedimentary basins. The extraction is elegantly simple — chlorine gas bubbled through the brine displaces the bromine, which is then blown out with steam.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1826.
In living things
Bromine spent most of the twentieth century as the halogen with no biological job, until an enzyme called peroxidasin was found to use bromide — and nothing else will substitute — to weld collagen IV molecules together with a sulfur–nitrogen cross-link. Collagen IV is the mesh of the basement membrane, the sheet every epithelium and every capillary is built on, so without that bond tissues do not assemble properly. Marine organisms had always been more forthcoming: seaweeds and sponges use bromoperoxidases to make thousands of brominated compounds, most of them chemical deterrents.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
溴Bromine in the dictionary →