Calcium

How to spell calcium

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce calcium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does calcium mean?

1. nounA soft, silvery-white metallic element essential to bone, teeth, and many biological processes, abundant in limestone, chalk, and dairy foods.

Calcium in a sentence

• The doctor advised her to eat more dairy to boost her calcium intake.

• A deficiency of calcium can weaken the bones over time.

Where does calcium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin calx, with the stem calc-, which meant 'lime' or 'limestone', the soft stone that was burned to make the building material we still call lime. The same Latin root also gave us 'calculate', because the Romans counted using small limestone pebbles called calculi, and 'chalk', which is a soft form of calcium carbonate. The English chemist Humphry Davy coined the modern term in 1808 when he first isolated the metallic element by electrolysis, attaching the suffix -ium that scientists use to name metals. He built the name on the classical root for lime because the element is the chief constituent of limestone, chalk, and quicklime. The spelling keeps that hard c-a-l-c sequence intact, which is the part writers must hold onto, with the -ium ending pronounced as a quick 'ee-um'.

How the word is built

• calc- (from Latin calx: lime, limestone)
• -ium (suffix naming a metallic chemical element)