Neon

How the character is built

气

The 气 radical marks this as a gas, 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.

Where you actually meet it

氖灯 (nǎidēng) neon lamp

The element itself

Neon is one of the most common elements in the universe and one of the rarest things in the ground, and the reason is that it refuses to react with anything. Elements that form compounds get built into rock and stay; neon never did, so Earth's share drifted off during the planet's hot youth and what little survives is a trace in the air. Every neon sign in the world is filled with gas distilled out of ordinary atmosphere, and the orange-red glow is neon's own — the blues and greens in a sign come from other gases or coloured tubing.

Where it sits among the 118

Neon melts at -249°C (24.56 K) — lower than 95 of the 97 elements whose melting point has been measured, and higher than 1. The grey dots are the rest of the table.

In the Earth's crust there is about 5 milligrams in every tonne of rock. That makes it commoner than 19 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 1898.

The full entry

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

氖Neon in the dictionary →

Others built the same way

Every one of these carries 气, and every one is a gas.

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