Dysprosium

Traditional: 鏑

How the character is built

钅

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 dí the same character means an arrowhead (鸣镝, a whistling arrow); only as the element is it dī.

This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.

The element itself

Dysprosium's name comes from the Greek for "hard to get at", which was fair comment when it was teased out of holmium in the 1880s and is still fair now. It is one of the heavy rare earths, and these come from a geological setting almost unique to southern China: granite that has weathered for millions of years in a warm wet climate until the rare earths have been released and stuck lightly onto the surfaces of clay minerals. That makes them recoverable by soaking the clay rather than crushing rock, which is cheap, and environmentally messy.

Where it sits among the 118

Dysprosium melts at 1407°C (1680 K) — lower than 30 of the 97 elements whose melting point has been measured, and higher than 66. The grey dots are the rest of the table.

In the Earth's crust there is about 5.2 grams in every tonne of rock. That makes it commoner than 51 of the 93 elements that occur naturally at all. The scale is logarithmic: each gridline is ten times the one below it.

First isolated in 1886.

Where it comes from in China

Dysprosium, added to neodymium magnets so they keep their strength when hot, comes from the weathered granite clays of southern China rather than from any hard-rock mine. The granites of the Nanling region are unusually rich in the heavy end of the lanthanide series, and deep weathering concentrates them further, so the heavy rare earths are a southern story while the light ones are a northern one. That split — Inner Mongolia's carbonatite against Jiangxi's clay hillsides — is the single most useful thing to know about where rare earths actually come from.

Jiangxi, Guangdong, Fujian and Hunan — shaded on a map drawn from Natural Earth's public-domain data.

The full entry

For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.

镝Dysprosium in the dictionary →

Others built the same way

Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.

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