There are two variants of the metal's name in current use,
aluminium and
aluminum (besides the obsolete
alumium). The
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) adopted
aluminium as the standard international name for the element in 1990, but three years later recognized
aluminum as an acceptable variant. Hence their periodic table includes both.
[51] IUPAC prefers the use of
aluminium in its internal publications, although nearly as many IUPAC publications use the spelling
aluminum.
[52]
Most countries use the spelling
aluminium. In the United States, the spelling
aluminum predominates.
[53][54] The
Canadian Oxford Dictionary prefers
aluminum, whereas the Australian
Macquarie Dictionary prefers
aluminium. In 1926, the
American Chemical Society officially decided to use
aluminum in its publications; American dictionaries typically label the spelling
aluminium as a British variant.
The name derives from its status as a base of
alum. "Alum" in turn is a
Latin word that literally means "bitter salt".
[55]
The earliest citation given in the
Oxford English Dictionary for any word used as a name for this element is
alumium, which British chemist and inventor
Humphry Davy employed in 1808 for the metal he was trying to isolate electrolytically from the mineral
alumina. The citation is from the journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: "Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium."
[56][57]
Davy settled on
aluminum by the time he published his 1812 book
Chemical Philosophy: "This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina."
[58] But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the
Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, in a review of Davy's book, objected to
aluminum and proposed the name
aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."
[59]
The
-ium suffix conformed to the precedent set in other newly discovered elements of the time: potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and
strontium (all of which Davy isolated himself). Nevertheless,
-um spellings for elements were not unknown at the time, as for example
platinum, known to Europeans since the sixteenth century,
molybdenum, discovered in 1778, and
tantalum, discovered in 1802. The
-um suffix is consistent with the universal spelling
alumina for the
oxide, as
lanthana is the oxide of
lanthanum, and
magnesia,
ceria, and
thoria are the oxides of
magnesium,
cerium, and
thorium respectively.
The spelling used throughout the 19th century by most U.S. chemists was
aluminium, but common usage is less clear.
[60] The
aluminum spelling is used in the
Webster's Dictionary of 1828. In his advertising handbill for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal 1892, Charles Martin Hall used the
-um spelling, despite his constant use of the
-ium spelling in all the patents
[48] he filed between 1886 and 1903.
[61] It has consequently been suggested that the spelling reflects an easier to pronounce word with one fewer syllable, or that the spelling on the flier was a mistake. Hall's domination of production of the metal ensured that the spelling
aluminum became the standard in North America; the
Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, though, continued to use the
-ium version.
FS 2004
Originally Posted by Sascha66
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