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.
An ancient character; 银行 is literally a 'silver firm'.
Where you actually meet it
银行 (yínháng) bank
The element itself
Silver conducts electricity better than any other metal, copper included, and carries heat better than any metal too — diamond is the only thing that beats it. It tarnishes not from oxygen but from traces of sulfur in the air. It does occur as native metal, sometimes in spectacular wire-like growths, but most silver has always been won from lead ores, and most of it today is a by-product of mining something else entirely. The great exception was Cerro Rico above Potosí in Bolivia, a single mountain of silver ore whose output reshaped the money supply of two hemispheres and was extracted at appalling human cost.
Where it sits among the 118
Silver is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In Chinese history and language
For most of imperial history silver did not circulate as coin at all; it moved as weighed metal, cast into the boat-shaped ingots called 元宝 yuánbǎo that are still folded in paper and burned for the dead. From the late Ming the state commuted tax obligations into silver payments, which pulled Japanese and New World silver across the oceans into China and tied the empire's fiscal health to a metal it barely mined. The residue in the language is the everyday word for a bank: 银行 yínháng, literally "the silver firm".
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
银Silver in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.