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.
Mainland 钫 fāng (phonetic 方); Taiwan instead uses 鍅 fǎ, echoing 法国 'France'.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Francium is the last element to have been discovered in nature rather than made, identified in 1939 by Marguerite Perey in the decay products of actinium. Its longest-lived form has a half-life of about twenty-two minutes, so there is no such thing as a sample of it — perhaps a few tens of grams exist in the entire crust at any moment, scattered atom by atom. Everything textbooks say about its properties as the heaviest alkali metal is extrapolation, because nobody has ever had enough of it to weigh.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1939.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钫Francium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.