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.
Not a modern coinage: 铂 was already an old word for thin sheet metal / metal foil.
Where you actually meet it
铂金 (bójīn) — platinum, the everyday jewellery word
The element itself
Spanish colonists in the Chocó rivers of Colombia found heavy white grains mixed with their placer gold, could not melt them with any furnace they had, and dismissed the stuff as platina — "little silver", an unwanted contaminant. It took a hotter flame and another century for platinum to become precious. Nearly all of it now comes from a handful of layered intrusions — most famously a seam in the Bushveld under half a metre thick that can be followed for hundreds of kilometres — and from nickel sulfide ores in the Siberian Arctic.
Where it sits among the 118
Platinum is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铂Platinum in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.