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
Niobium spent decades under two names, columbium and niobium, because it is so hard to separate from tantalum that chemists kept rediscovering the same thing and disagreeing about whether it was new. It comes almost entirely from carbonatite — a genuinely strange igneous rock made of carbonate minerals rather than silicates, welling up from unusually deep sources — and a small number of Brazilian carbonatites account for most of what the world uses. A few hundred grams of niobium per tonne of steel makes pipeline and structural steel dramatically stronger, which is where nearly all of it goes.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1801.
Where it comes from in China
Bayan Obo holds one of the largest niobium resources on Earth, and it is barely touched. The niobium sits in pyrochlore and aeschynite grains finely intergrown with everything else in the ore, which makes it awkward to liberate, so most of the world's niobium comes instead from Brazilian carbonatites where it is coarse and clean. It is a useful reminder that an element's availability is settled by mineralogy, not by tonnage.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铌Niobium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.