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
补锌 (bǔxīn) to take zinc supplements
The element itself
Zinc is the reason a galvanised bucket does not rust: the coating corrodes preferentially, protecting the steel beneath even where it is scratched through. Its metallurgy is awkward, because zinc boils at a lower temperature than the furnace needed to reduce its ore, so the vapour simply escapes and reoxidises — which is why brass was made for centuries by cementing copper with zinc ore before anyone reliably produced zinc metal. The problem was solved by distilling it in sealed retorts, a technique worked out in India centuries before it reached Europe.
Where it sits among the 118
Zinc is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In living things
Zinc's virtue is that it refuses to do redox chemistry. It sits stubbornly in one oxidation state, so it can be placed at the heart of a protein as a strong positive charge with no risk of it spitting out radicals — a Lewis acid on a leash. Carbonic anhydrase uses it to convert carbon dioxide and water into bicarbonate at close to a million reactions a second, fast enough to keep pace with blood flowing through a capillary. It also holds shapes together: the zinc finger, a fold too small to be stable on its own, is stitched around a single zinc ion, and a large share of human transcription factors are built from repeats of it.
In Chinese history and language
Zinc boils before it can be tapped as a liquid, so smelting it means distilling it, and China was doing that at industrial scale by the Ming in banks of sealed clay retorts along the Yangtze. The metal went quietly into the coinage as brass, changing what a Chinese cash coin was actually made of without changing how it looked. Its old name is a small unsolved puzzle: 倭铅 wōqiān pairs the character for lead with the one used for Japan, and quite why has never been satisfactorily explained.
Where it comes from in China
Zinc and lead cluster in the southwest, in a triangle of carbonate-hosted deposits across Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou — Huize is the classic — where warm brines moving through limestone left sulfides in the cracks. The great oddity is Jinding at Lanping in Yunnan, the largest lead-zinc body in China and hosted in sandstone rather than carbonate: it formed around a dome of salt that rose through the fill of a basin being squeezed as India drove into Asia. It is the sort of deposit geologists argue about, because it refuses to fit the usual categories.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锌Zinc in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.