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.
Mainland 锝 dé, but Taiwan writes 鎝 and reads it tǎ — a genuine cross-strait split inside this range.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Technetium was the gap that would not fill. Element 43 sat empty between molybdenum and ruthenium through decades of false claims, and the reason turned out to be that it has no stable isotope at all — any that Earth formed with decayed away long ago. It was finally made in a cyclotron in 1937, the first element created rather than found, and its name says so. Vanishingly small traces do occur naturally in uranium ore, produced continuously by spontaneous fission, which is a strange kind of half-existence for an element with no geology.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1937.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锝Technetium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.