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
锆石 (gàoshí) zircon
The element itself
Zircon is the mineral that refuses to die: it survives weathering, transport, burial and even remelting, so grains of it get recycled through sediment for billions of years carrying their history intact. When it crystallises it accepts uranium into its structure and rejects lead almost completely, which means any lead found inside a zircon grain must have come from uranium decaying in place — the single most reliable clock in geology. Grains from the Jack Hills of Western Australia have been dated to about 4.4 billion years, older than any surviving rock, and they are the only direct sample we have of the earliest Earth.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1789.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锆Zirconium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.