Manganese

How to spell manganese

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce manganese

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does manganese mean?

1. nounA hard, brittle grey metallic element (symbol Mn) used chiefly to strengthen steel and in dry-cell batteries.

Manganese in a sentence

• The steel mill adds a small amount of manganese to harden the alloy.

• A deficiency of manganese in the soil can stunt the growth of certain crops.

Where does manganese come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This is the name of a hard, brittle metallic element, and its history is tangled up with that of magnesium. It descends from the Medieval Latin word magnesia, which was used for various dark mineral powders; a black manganese ore, pyrolusite, was known as magnesia nigra, literally 'black magnesia'. As the name passed into Italian it was reshaped to manganese, and French borrowed it in the same form before English took it over in the 1670s. The metal itself was first isolated in 1774 by the Swedish chemist Johan Gottlieb Gahn, and the spelling stabilised with that distinctive run of letters from the Italian form. Because manganese, magnesia, and magnesium all spring from the same root, the muddled relationship between them is precisely why the middle of the word, the unstressed -ga-ne- stretch, is so easy to fumble.

How the word is built

• mangan- (from Medieval Latin magnesia, a mineral name)
• -ese (noun ending, via Italian and French)