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.
Where you actually meet it
钛合金 (tàihéjīn) titanium alloy
The element itself
Titanium is among the ten most abundant elements in the crust and yet costs many times what steel does, and the reason is entirely in the extraction. It bonds to oxygen so tenaciously that the standard process reduces it in sealed vessels with magnesium, batch by batch over days, producing a porous lump that must then be melted under vacuum. Most of the ore is not mined from hard rock at all but dredged from heavy-mineral beach sands, where ilmenite and rutile grains have been sorted and concentrated by surf over thousands of years.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1791.
Where it comes from in China
Panzhihua, in the far south of Sichuan, is where titanium and iron come out of the same rock. Around 260 million years ago a flood-basalt eruption on a scale the modern world has never come close to — the Emeishan basalts — poured across southwestern China, and in the magma chambers feeding it, magnetite crystallised laced with titanium and vanadium and settled out in layers. That titanium made the ore stubborn to smelt for a long time, and the district's history is largely the story of learning to treat it as an asset rather than a contaminant.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钛Titanium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.