How the character is built
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
氮气 (dànqì) nitrogen gas
The element itself
Nitrogen is nearly four fifths of the air by volume and almost entirely useless in that form, because the triple bond holding N₂ together is one of the strongest in chemistry. Before industrial fixation, the only large natural stockpile anyone could mine was the nitrate caliche of the Atacama, which survives only because that stretch of desert essentially never rains — anywhere wetter, the salts would simply wash away. Liquid nitrogen, at about minus 196°C, is cheap enough to pour out, a by-product of the same air separation that makes oxygen.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1772.
In living things
Every amino acid and every base in DNA carries nitrogen, and the air is nearly four fifths nitrogen — yet the two are almost completely sealed off from each other by the N≡N triple bond, one of the strongest in chemistry. A limited set of bacteria and archaea hold the key: the enzyme nitrogenase pries that bond apart at ordinary temperature and pressure, at a ruinous cost in ATP, using a metal cluster built around iron and molybdenum. Everything else in the biosphere, plants and animals alike, lives on nitrogen that some microbe has already broken open, or on the industrial imitation of the same trick.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
氮Nitrogen in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 气, and every one is a gas.