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
Scandium is not actually rare in the crust — it is more common than lead — but it is almost perversely evenly spread, so there is nowhere on Earth worth digging a hole specifically to get it. It has no ore of its own worth the name, and what reaches the market is scavenged from the residues of other operations: uranium tailings, nickel laterite processing, titanium refining. That is the whole reason it stayed a laboratory curiosity for a century despite making genuinely excellent aluminium alloys.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1879.
Where it comes from in China
Scandium is not especially rare in the crust, but it almost never gathers into an ore of its own, so it has no home mine and is scavenged from other people's residues. In China that means the titanium processing streams at Panzhihua in Sichuan and the rare-earth tailings at Bayan Obo. The reason it stays scattered is chemical: the scandium ion is too small to follow the rare earths and close enough to iron and magnesium to hide in trace amounts inside ordinary rock-forming minerals, so it never quite finds a mineral of its own.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钪Scandium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.