Nickel

How to spell nickel

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nickel

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nickel mean?

1. nounA hard, silvery-white metallic element used in alloys, plating, and coinage.
2. nounA five-cent coin in the United States and Canada.

Nickel in a sentence

• The kettle had a thin coating of nickel to resist rust.

• She dropped a nickel into the parking meter.

• Stainless steel contains chromium and nickel for durability.

• The total came to forty cents, so he handed over a dime, a quarter, and a nickel.

Where does nickel come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nickel comes from the German word Kupfernickel, which translates roughly as 'copper demon' or 'devil's copper'. German miners coined the term in the 1600s for a reddish ore that looked as though it should yield copper but stubbornly refused to; they blamed the trickery on Nickel, a mischievous goblin (a pet form of the name Nikolaus, and a cousin of the English 'Old Nick' for the devil). When the Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt isolated the silvery metal from that ore in 1751, he simply clipped the name down to nickel. English adopted the shortened form soon after, and the spelling preserves that German -el ending rather than the more English-looking '-le', which is precisely where writers go wrong. The five-cent coin picked up the name in the United States because it was struck largely from the metal.

How the word is built

• nickel (from German Kupfernickel, 'copper demon'); a single unanalysable noun in English