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.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Vanadium was named after Vanadís, a name of the Norse goddess Freyja, because its compounds run through such a range of colours — violet, green, blue, yellow — as the metal changes oxidation state. It rarely forms deposits of its own; it substitutes into magnetite, and the great vanadium-bearing bodies are titanium-rich iron ores where the vanadium is recovered from the slag as a bonus of steelmaking. A curious second source is oil: some crude carries vanadium inherited from the marine organisms it formed from, and it concentrates in the ash when the residue is burned.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1801.
In living things
Vanadium is responsible for one of biology's genuinely unexplained habits. Sea squirts — the sac-like tunicates that encrust harbour walls — hoard vanadium in specialised blood cells at concentrations up to a million times greater than the surrounding seawater, storing it in a strongly acidic compartment in an unusual low oxidation state. Various explanations have been offered, from oxygen transport to chemical defence, and none has stuck. Elsewhere the element is more prosaic: some nitrogen-fixing bacteria carry a backup nitrogenase that uses vanadium when molybdenum is scarce.
Where it comes from in China
Vanadium comes from two very different Chinese rocks. At Panzhihua in Sichuan it rides inside titanomagnetite in the layered intrusions that were the plumbing of the Emeishan flood basalts, and is recovered from the slag once the iron has been smelted. The other source is peculiar to China: 'stone coal', black shales of Cambrian age in Hunan, Hubei and Shaanxi so loaded with metals and so poor in combustible carbon that they are worked for vanadium rather than burned for heat.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钒Vanadium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.