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.
Built on 乌 wū 'black', after the dark ore; the symbol W comes from the rival name wolfram.
Where you actually meet it
钨丝 (wūsī) — tungsten filament, the wire inside an old light bulb
The element itself
Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, over 3400°C, which is why it spent a century as the filament in every light bulb and remains the material of choice wherever something must glow or hold shape in extreme heat. Its name in English comes from Swedish for "heavy stone"; the symbol comes from wolframite, named by German smelters who found the mineral devoured their tin yield "like a wolf". One of its ores, scheelite, glows an intense blue-white under ultraviolet light, and prospectors have walked hillsides after dark with a lamp looking for it.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1783.
In living things
Tungsten is the heaviest element known to have a biological job, and it holds it in the least hospitable places on Earth. Hyperthermophilic archaea from hot springs and deep-sea vents run oxidoreductases built on tungsten rather than the molybdenum their relatives use — the two metals are almost identical in size, but in hot, oxygen-free, sulfide-rich water tungsten is the more available and the more chemically suited of the pair. In ordinary oxygenated environments the relationship inverts, and tungsten behaves as an antagonist, sliding into molybdenum's cofactor and leaving the enzyme dead.
Where it comes from in China
Tungsten is the Nanling story: a belt of Jurassic granites running through southern Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangdong and Guangxi, where the last and most water-rich dregs of a cooling magma escaped into cracks and crystallised as quartz veins studded with black wolframite. Tungsten's ion is small but carries a charge of six, and ordinary rock-forming minerals have no site that can balance it, so it is left behind in the melt until the very end and then precipitates almost pure — which is why these veins are so sharply defined and so rich. A large share of the world's tungsten still comes from this one belt, whose classic sites are the great vein swarms at Xihuashan and the tungsten-bearing skarn at Shizhuyuan.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钨Tungsten in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.