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.
A metalloid the namers assigned to 金 rather than 石, unlike 硅 and 砷.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Germanium is the element that made Mendeleev's reputation. He had left a gap for an unknown "eka-silicon" and specified its density, its melting behaviour and the properties of its oxide; fifteen years later Clemens Winkler pulled it out of ore from a Saxon silver mine and the numbers matched almost exactly. It has no deposits of its own and is recovered from zinc ore residues and from the fly ash of certain coals. Silicon eventually displaced it in transistors, but it never left optics — germanium is transparent to infrared, so thermal cameras look at the world through it.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1886.
Where it comes from in China
Germanium's Chinese sources are coal seams, which sounds odd until you look at the setting. At Lincang in Yunnan a Miocene peat swamp sat directly on top of a granite unusually rich in germanium; hot fluids circulating up out of that granite carried the metal into the bog, and the organic matter there locked it away, because germanium binds readily to organic compounds. The lignite at Wulantuga in Inner Mongolia works the same way, and in both places the coal is treated as ore rather than as fuel.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锗Germanium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.