Aluminium

How to spell aluminium

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce aluminium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does aluminium mean?

1. nounA lightweight, silvery, corrosion-resistant metallic element widely used for cans, foil, frames and aircraft parts.

Aluminium in a sentence

• The kitchen drawer was full of aluminium foil and cling film.

• Modern bicycle frames are often made from aluminium rather than steel.

Where does aluminium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin alumen, which named alum, a bitter astringent salt long used in dyeing and tanning. When the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy was working on the metal early in the nineteenth century he first proposed the name 'alumium', then revised it to 'aluminum', before the form 'aluminium' was settled on to match the pattern of other newly named elements such as sodium, potassium and magnesium, which all end in -ium. That tidy classical ending is exactly why the British and international scientific spelling carries the extra 'i', giving the five syllables al-u-min-i-um. The element itself was first isolated in metallic form in the 1820s, and the IUPAC later adopted aluminium as the standard international name. The spelling trap lives in that second 'i' before the final 'um', the syllable that American usage drops entirely in 'aluminum'.

How the word is built

• alumin- (from Latin alumen: alum, a bitter astringent salt)
• -ium (suffix naming a metallic element)

British and American spelling

Aluminium is the British spelling. American English spells it aluminum.