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.
Phonetic 有 yǒu, standing for the 'eu-' of europium.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Europium is a geochemical fingerprint. Alone among the rare earths it readily takes a lower charge, and in that state it is close enough in size to calcium — closer still to strontium — that it slips into the feldspar crystallising out of a magma while its siblings stay in the melt. The result is that feldspar-rich rocks carry a europium surplus and the rocks left behind carry a matching deficit — a signature that lets geologists reconstruct how a body of magma evolved, and which is written across the samples brought back from the Moon.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1896.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铕Europium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.