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.
Ancient character, and the other homophone (with 硒 xī) behind the mainland's switch from 矽 to 硅.
Where you actually meet it
锡纸 (xīzhǐ) tin foil, kitchen foil
The element itself
Tin is easy to smelt and alloys with copper to give bronze, which is why an entire age is named after the combination — and why tin, scarce and unevenly distributed, drove some of the earliest long-distance trade. Its ore, cassiterite, is dense and tough, so rivers concentrate it into placer deposits that can be worked by washing gravel; the great tin belt running from Myanmar down through Thailand and Malaysia to the Indonesian islands was mined this way for centuries. Bend a tin bar and it emits an audible creak, the "tin cry", and in prolonged deep cold the metal can crumble into a grey powder.
Where it sits among the 118
Tin is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In Chinese history and language
Bronze is copper plus tin, and the Zhou-era 考工记 Kǎogōngjì lays out 六齐 liùqí, six recipes giving different proportions for bells, axes, blades and mirrors — as close to a written alloy specification as the ancient world gets. What its two ingredient words actually named is still argued over, because mixing raw copper and raw tin by those ratios does not reproduce the bronzes that survive; the recipes may have been blending two ready-made alloys rather than two metals. Tin's humbler afterlife is 锡箔 xībó, tinfoil folded into ingot shapes and burned as spirit money.
Where it comes from in China
Tin means Gejiu in southeastern Yunnan, where granite intruded Triassic limestone and left cassiterite in skarns, veins and the placer gravels weathered out of them. The district has been worked for well over a thousand years, and the town is still built around it. A second belt runs through Dachang in Guangxi, where tin comes tangled up with zinc, lead and indium in the same ore.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锡Tin in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.