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.
Read bǎ as the element; the same character is pá in unrelated older senses.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Palladium is the platinum-group metal with a party trick: it absorbs hydrogen into its own crystal lattice in astonishing quantity, soaking it up like a sponge and releasing it again on heating. That, and its appetite for grabbing molecules and holding them still, is what makes it such a good catalyst. It occurs with the other platinum metals in a very small number of deposits — layered intrusions and a few nickel-copper sulfide bodies — and is otherwise almost absent from the crust, because platinum-group metals dissolve readily in iron and mostly went down into the core.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1803.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钯Palladium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.