Random Metal Generator

What the random metal generator does

You need a metal. Maybe a quiz question, maybe a codename for a server, maybe you are forty minutes into a naming meeting and the room has gone quiet.

This generator hands you one. Pull a single metal, or pull a batch and read down the list until something stops you.

What follows is the interesting part. Where the line between metal and not-metal actually sits, why gold is Au and not Go, and what happens when a person gets to name an element.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. Anywhere from 1 to 100. If you are browsing rather than deciding, pull a big batch.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Narrow it down. Use the three boxes underneath if you want a metal that starts with a certain letter, ends with one, or has a particular string buried in it.
4. Press Copy to take the whole set with you.

What counts as a metal

Copper is a metal. Sulfur is not. You did not have to think about either of those.

Now try silicon.

That pause is the entire subject.

The periodic table holds 118 elements and it does not have a column marked "metals." There is no line printed on it anywhere. Metals take up most of the table, the nonmetals huddle in the top right corner, and running between them is a diagonal staircase of elements that will not commit: boron, silicon, germanium, arsenic, antimony, tellurium. The metalloids.

A metalloid conducts, but badly. It looks metallic and behaves like a nonmetal, or the other way round, depending on the temperature and on what you are asking of it. Silicon is the one in your pocket right now. The entire semiconductor industry exists because silicon refuses to be either thing, and that refusal turns out to be more useful than either answer would have been.

So are metalloids metals?

Chemistry does not settle it. Convention does, and convention is not unanimous. Textbooks draw the staircase in slightly different places. Antimony gets counted as a metal often enough, because it is grey and shiny and brittle and behaves like one inside an alloy. Polonium gets filed as a metalloid about as often as it gets filed as a metal.

Then there is astatine, element 85, which people have argued about for eighty years. Nobody has ever seen it. Not a photograph, not a speck. It is so radioactive that any visible quantity would boil itself away from its own heat, and the largest amount ever made at once is measured in hundredths of a microgram. In 2013 a team at Cornell and Edinburgh, including the Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, ran the calculation properly with relativistic effects included and concluded that solid astatine would be a metal, and a monatomic one, and possibly a superconductor.

Concluded on paper. Nobody has checked. Element 85 has sat in the halogen column since 1940 and the honest position is that we still do not know what it looks like.

Draw the line at the conventional staircase and 92 of the 118 elements are metals. The other 26 are hydrogen, the halogens, the noble gases, the handful of nonmetals in the top right, and the six metalloids in the middle who would not pick a side.

Taking a metal name apart

Take gold. Its symbol is Au.

Not Go. Not Gd, which is gadolinium. Au, which is not in the word "gold" at all. It comes from aurum, and that is Latin.

Gold is not alone. Ten metals carry a symbol that has nothing to do with their English name:

• Gold is Au, from aurum
• Silver is Ag, from argentum
• Copper is Cu, from cuprum
• Iron is Fe, from ferrum
• Tin is Sn, from stannum
• Lead is Pb, from plumbum
• Mercury is Hg, from hydrargyrum, "water-silver"
• Sodium is Na, from natrium
• Potassium is K, from kalium
• Tungsten is W, from wolfram

Now look at the first seven of those and notice what they are. Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, mercury. Those are the seven metals known to the ancient world. All seven. Not five of them, not a rough overlap. Exactly the seven, in the same list, with the same problem.

Which is not a coincidence. Those metals had Latin names already, because people had been smelting them for thousands of years before anyone thought to write chemistry down. The English word turned up late and lost the argument to a language that got there first.

Seven is a strangely small number for such a long stretch of history. They are the seven a person could get at: gold and copper turn up in the ground already metal, and the rest come out of ore at temperatures a charcoal fire can reach. Everything else needed a furnace nobody had built, or electricity, or a particle accelerator. Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, it is what your window frames are made of, and nobody isolated it until 1825 or made it cheaply until electrolysis arrived in 1886. It was sitting under everyone's feet the entire time.

The last three on that list lost a different fight. Humphry Davy pulled sodium and potassium apart with a battery in 1807 and named them in English, after soda and after potash. Continental Europe was already saying natrium and kalium. Berzelius, who invented the symbol system, was Swedish. The symbols went continental and the English names stayed home. Tungsten is the same argument twice over: English took the Swedish tung sten, "heavy stone," and the symbol took the German wolfram.

There is a tell you can see from the outside. Most metal names end in m, because -ium became the convention and almost everything named since has followed it. The ones that do not end in m are a short list: bismuth, cobalt, copper, gold, iron, lead, manganese, mercury, nickel, silver, tin, tungsten, zinc.

Seven of those thirteen are the metals of antiquity. The convention arrived after they did, and they were far too old to be made to follow it.

The names that arrived last

On 28 November 2016 the seventh row of the periodic table was finished.

IUPAC approved four names that day: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson, for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118. That was the last gap. Everything from hydrogen to 118 now has a name, and the table you were taught from is only as old as those four words.

You do not get to name an element whatever you like. The rules allow five things and nothing else: a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property of the element, or a scientist. That is the whole menu, and the 2016 batch ordered from two lines of it. Moscovium is the Moscow region. Tennessine is Tennessee. Nihonium is Nihon, one of the two Japanese words for Japan, from the RIKEN team who made it, and it is the first element ever discovered in and named after an Asian country.

Nihonium carries something else, though, and it is the best story on this list.

In 1909 a Japanese chemist named Masataka Ogawa announced he had found a new element and proposed to call it nipponium. He was wrong, or at least he could never make the claim stand up, and the name went nowhere. A hundred and seven years later the RIKEN team chose nihonium partly in homage to him. He did not live to see it. He got his element anyway, from people who were not born when he tried.

Oganesson is the other kind of story. It is named for Yuri Oganessian, who was alive to see it, which has only happened one other time in the entire history of the table. The first was seaborgium in 1997, for Glenn Seaborg. Seaborgium is in this list. Oganesson is not, and the reason why is hiding in plain sight.

The rules tie the ending of the name to the group it lands in. -ium for groups 1 through 16. -ine for group 17, the halogens. -on for group 18, the noble gases. So:

• nihonium and moscovium end in -ium, which puts them in groups 1 to 16, which makes them metals
• tennessine ends in -ine, which makes it a halogen, which does not
• oganesson ends in -on, which makes it a noble gas, which does not either

Two of the last four elements ever named are metals and two are not, and you can sort them without knowing a single thing about them beyond how the word ends. The name is carrying the answer. That is not an accident of language. Somebody wrote it into the rules on purpose, so that a chemist meeting an unfamiliar element for the first time would already know roughly what they were dealing with.

Starts with, contains, and ends with

The three boxes do what they say, but the metals are unevenly spread, and that catches people out.

• Starts with has five dead letters. Nothing comes back for J, K, Q, X or W. The W is the good one. Tungsten's symbol is W, and no metal on Earth has a name that starts with it.
• Ends with is lopsided. The overwhelming majority of metals end in m, so asking for m gives you almost everything and asking for anything else gives you a handful. Try d for gold and lead, or n for iron and tin.
• Contains searches the whole name and ignores capitals. Type ium and you get the modern names, which is most of them. Type ine and you get nothing at all, which you now know is not a bug.

Some letters are simply thin. O, U and V have one metal each. Ask for five metals starting with O and you get osmium, on its own, and the quantity box drops itself to 1 to tell you that is all there is.

You also do not need to press Generate after every change. Type in any of the three boxes and the results redraw as you go.

How a metal gets picked

Nothing clever is happening, and that is deliberate.

The metals come from a list our team researched and checked by hand against the periodic table, one at a time. When you press Generate, that list is narrowed to whatever matches the filters you typed, and the results are drawn at random from what is left. Within a single batch you will never see the same metal twice.

All of it happens on your own device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Choosing one to name something after

A great deal of software takes its codenames from this table, and there is a reason it keeps happening. The words are real, they are short, they sound like they mean something, and nobody owns them.

Three things go wrong.

Syllables. Gold is one. Praseodymium is five. That difference does not matter on a slide and it matters enormously in a standup you have to sit through every morning for two years. Say the shortlist out loud before you commit. If people start abbreviating it in week one, you picked wrong.

Baggage. Some of these words arrive carrying something. Lead means poison. Plutonium means bomb. Polonium means assassination, to anyone who read a newspaper in 2006. Nobody will say this in the meeting, and everybody will feel it.

Crowding. Mercury, Titanium, Chrome, Cobalt, Palladium and Platinum are all heavily spoken for. You will spend the rest of the project's life being the second result. Meanwhile hafnium, dysprosium, rhenium and thulium are real, pronounceable and almost entirely unclaimed.

The obscure end of the table is where the good names are, and it is the part nobody scrolls to.

Questions people ask

Is mercury still a metal if it is a liquid?

Yes. Metal describes how the electrons behave, not whether the thing is hard at room temperature. Mercury conducts, bonds and alloys like a metal and simply happens to melt at about -39 degrees Celsius. Gallium melts in your hand at around 30 degrees and nobody has ever argued about gallium.

Why are there 92 metals when uranium is element 92?

Coincidence, and a genuinely annoying one. Uranium is the 92nd element by atomic number. There are 92 metals. The two numbers have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. They simply collided.

Why can I not find caesium?

Because it is spelled cesium here, the American way, and IUPAC spells it caesium. We use aluminium, which follows IUPAC, and cesium, which does not, so the spelling is not consistent and we would rather tell you than let you hunt. Nothing here contains the letters "ae".

Are the synthetic elements really metals if nobody has held one?

Nobody has held one, and for most of them nobody ever will. They exist a few atoms at a time and decay in milliseconds. They are classed as metals based on where they sit in the table and on what relativistic calculations predict about their electron structure. That is a well-grounded prediction rather than an observation, and the difference is worth keeping straight.

So how many metals are there, exactly?

Ninety-two, drawing the line at the conventional staircase. If you were taught a different number you were probably taught correctly at the time. A textbook printed before 2010 was counting 87, because five of these had not been named yet. One printed between 2012 and 2016 says 90. Neither is wrong. They are old. The number moved because the register moved, not because the chemistry did.

Can the same metal come up twice?

Not within a single generation. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play, so a metal can repeat across separate presses.

References

1. Hermann, A., Hoffmann, R. and Ashcroft, N. W. (2013). Condensed astatine: monatomic and metallic. Physical Review Letters, 111(11), 116404. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.116404
2. Koppenol, W. H., Corish, J., García-Martínez, J., Meija, J. and Reedijk, J. (2016). How to name new chemical elements (IUPAC Recommendations 2016). Pure and Applied Chemistry, 88(4), 401 to 405. https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2015-0802
3. Öhrström, L. and Reedijk, J. (2016). Names and symbols of the elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 (IUPAC Recommendations 2016). Pure and Applied Chemistry, 88(12), 1225 to 1229. https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2016-0501
4. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (2016). IUPAC announces the names of the elements 113, 115, 117, and 118. https://iupac.org/iupac-announces-the-names-of-the-elements-113-115-117-and-118/