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.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Nickel arrives in two completely unrelated geological packages. One is magmatic sulfide, where a sulfide melt separated out of molten rock and sank, carrying the nickel with it — the Sudbury basin in Ontario is the spectacular case, a nickel field created by a meteorite impact nearly two billion years ago that melted the crust beneath it. The other is laterite: tropical soils weathered for millions of years until the nickel is left behind near the surface, which is why Indonesia and New Caledonia matter. Nickel is also, with iron, most of what Earth's core is made of.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1751.
In living things
Urease was the first enzyme ever crystallised, in 1926 — the first hard evidence in a long-running argument about whether enzymes were proteins at all, though it took several more years and other crystallised enzymes before the point was conceded — and the nickel atoms at its heart went unnoticed for another half-century. The enzyme splits urea into ammonia and carbon dioxide, letting plants and soil bacteria recover nitrogen from waste, and it is also how the stomach ulcer bacterium neutralises the acid around itself. Anaerobes use nickel again in hydrogenases, whose active sites pair it with iron to make or consume hydrogen gas. Outside metabolism, nickel is also one of the commonest triggers of contact allergy, which is an immune response to the metal rather than poisoning by it.
In Chinese history and language
白铜 báitóng, "white copper", is a copper-nickel-zinc alloy that Yunnan smelters were making long before nickel was recognised as an element, and it looks unnervingly like silver without tarnishing like it. Exported through Canton, it reached eighteenth-century Europe as paktong, where it was costly, admired and — because nobody could identify the third metal — impossible to reproduce. When European metallurgists finally worked it out they marketed the result as German silver; the Chinese original had been on the market for two centuries.
Where it comes from in China
Nickel means Jinchuan, in the desert of central Gansu: an intrusion small enough to walk across that holds one of the largest nickel sulfide bodies on Earth. The mechanism is a kind of sorting — as the ultramafic magma rose it became saturated in sulfur, and the sulfide melt that separated out is greedy for nickel, copper and the platinum metals, scavenging them from a far greater volume of magma before settling. A tiny body can therefore end up holding the metal budget of a huge one.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
镍Nickel in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.