mendelevium
/ˌmɛn.dəˈli.vi.əm/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.01 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
5
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A radioactive metallic transuranic chemical element (symbol Md) with atomic number 101, which is artificially produced in a particle accelerator.
Uncountable
noun
A radioactive metallic transuranic chemical element (symbol Md) with atomic number 101, which is artificially produced in a particle accelerator.
Countable
Example Sentences
- "Mendelevium, the heaviest and rarest form of matter known, has been produced in the University of California's cyclotron. Identity based on only 17 atoms of new element [subtitle]. […] Mendelevium is intensely radioactive, decaying by spontaneous fission. Its half-life is between a half hour and three hours. It has chemical properties similar to those of thulium, element 69, a rare earth."
- "There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium, / And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium, / And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium, / And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium."
- "Seven new elements were discovered with the 60-inch cyclotron: 85 (astatine), 93 (neptunium), 94 (plutonium), 96 (curium), 97 (berkelium), 98 (californium), and 101 (mendeleevium)."
- "In the expert hands of Enrico Fermi, beginning with 1934, neutron bombardment produced new atomic miracles. In 1940, Fermi created neptunium (Z = 93), the first artificial, 'trans-uranic', element. Others, also unstable, soon followed, among them fermium (Z = 100) and mendeleyevium (Z = 101)."
- "[Glenn Theodore] Seaborg would be the principal co-discoverer of ten elements on the periodic table: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, and element 106."
Etymology
From a modified version of Mendeleev + -ium (suffix forming names of metal elements), named in honour of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) who formulated the periodic law and created an early version of the periodic table of elements. The word was proposed by a team from the University of California, Berkeley, comprising the team leader Stanley Gerald Thompson and members Gregory Robert Choppin, Albert Ghiorso, Bernard George Harvey, and Glenn T. Seaborg, who artificially synthesized the element in early 1955. (The same name was proposed, but rejected, for the earlier-discovered elements berkelium and erbium.)
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌmɛn.dəˈli.vi.əm/
- British English: /ˌmɛn.dəˈliː.vi.əm/