How the character is built
The 石 radical marks this as a solid non-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.
Semantic 石 plus phonetic 帝 dì 'emperor'.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Tellurium is one of the rarest stable elements in Earth's crust, about as scarce as platinum, apparently because it formed volatile compounds that were lost while the planet was assembling. Where it does concentrate it does something unusual for a non-metal: it bonds directly with gold, forming telluride minerals that look nothing like gold at all. At Kalgoorlie in Western Australia the telluride ore went unrecognised for years and was used as road metal and building fill until someone finally assayed it — after which parts of the town's streets were dug up.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1783.
Where it comes from in China
Tellurium is normally a by-product of copper refining, scraped from the slimes at the bottom of an electrolytic cell — nobody sets out to mine it. The exception is Dashuigou, in Shimian county in western Sichuan, a small high-grade body on the western edge of the Yangtze craton that is worked for tellurium itself, with bismuth alongside. It appears to be the only deposit known anywhere where this element is the main event rather than an afterthought.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
碲Tellurium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 石, and every one is a solid non-metal.