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.
Semantic 金 plus phonetic 乙 yǐ, the second Heavenly Stem.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Yttrium comes with the best origin story in the table. A single small feldspar quarry at Ytterby, on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, produced a black mineral that turned out to contain a tangle of unknown elements, and chemists spent decades pulling them apart. Four elements — yttrium, ytterbium, terbium and erbium — are all named after that one village, and several more were first identified in material from the same hole. Yttrium itself is now unglamorously essential, in phosphors, in laser crystals, and in the ceramic that toughens zirconia.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1794.
In Chinese history and language
The heavy rare earths come from something stranger than a mine. In the hills of southern 江西 Jiāngxī, granite has rotted down into a deep clay that holds rare-earth ions loosely on the surfaces of its particles, so the metal is recovered by percolating a salt solution through the hillside rather than by crushing and smelting rock. Deposits of this ion-adsorption type were first recognised there at the end of the 1960s, and they need a particular conspiracy of granite, heat and heavy rain to form at all — which is why they belong to South China and the uplands just beyond it, and why the heavy end of the lanthanides has an unmistakable geography.
Where it comes from in China
Yttrium and the heavy rare earths come from a completely different kind of deposit to Bayan Obo's: the ion-adsorption clays of southern China, in Jiangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, Guangxi and Hunan. Granite there has sat under subtropical rain for millions of years until it rotted into clay, releasing its rare earths, which then cling loosely as bare ions to the surfaces of kaolinite. Nothing needs crushing or smelting — a salt solution poured through the weathered hillside swaps ammonium for the rare earths and washes them straight out, which is why these are leached rather than mined in the ordinary sense.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
钇Yttrium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.