Chemical elements are named for all sorts of reasons. Americium was named because it was discovered in the United States — there’s also Europium, named because it was discovered in Europe. Gallium is named after France (Gaul). Hassium is named after the German state Hesse, where it was discovered. There are loads of other examples, even including thulium, which is named after the mythical country of Thule, which was supposed by the Romans and Greeks to be somewhere in the far north. Thulium was discovered in Sweden and it’s very nearlymythical too; it’s so hard to obtain that the first scientist to isolate it had to go through 15,000 purification operations.
Then there are the elements named after individuals — not necessarily the discoverer, though. Fermium was named after Enrico Fermi, but it was just an homage. Johan Gadolin was a Finnish chemist in the 1700 and 1800s — he discovered yttrium, but didn’t discover gadolinium, which is named after him.
Some elements are named for their effects, such as hydrogen — it gets its name from a Greek phrase meaning “I beget water.” And the name nitrogen comes from a Greek phrase that means “I form native soda.” Oxygen, etymologically, means “I bring forth acid.”
Then there are the elements named for their characteristics. Phosphorus means “light bearer”, because phosphorus glows in the dark. Iodine means “violet,” which is the color of iodine when it’s a gas. Iron means “strong metal.” Radium got its name because it emits “rays” of radioactivity (at least, that’s how they thought it worked at the time). And you know how cheap jewelry uses zirconium instead of gold? People have known about that for so long that the name “zirconium” actually means “gold-like”.
A couple of elements have had surprising linguistic effects. Lead comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, but its chemical symbol is “Pb”, which is based on the Latin name “plumbum” — and that’s where English gets the word “plumbing,” even though we’ve since realized that using lead pipes for plumbing is a spectacularly bad idea.
Some elements just stink. Osmium means “smells” in Greek, which the stuff reportedly really does. And bromine is even worse; it means “stench”, and not only does it produce a horrible odor; it’s also the source of the English words “bromopnea” (bad breath) and “bromidrosis” (smelly sweat).
Finally, copper comes from the Greek word for Cyprus, which is where copper was mined a few millennia back. Because it was a pretty common metal, but really too soft for a lot of uses, it tended to get used for both coins and ornamental things like, say, badges. Badges for police officers, to be specific. And that led to “copper” being a synonym for pennies or other low-value currency, and also to both “copper” and “cop” being synonyms for police officers. The words are still pretty common even though US pennies are now made of zinc (copper is too expensive). Although I don’t know what police badges are made from now, I bet they don’t use copper either.
