Palladium

How to spell palladium

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce palladium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does palladium mean?

1. nounA rare silvery-white precious metal, chemical element number 46, used in catalytic converters, electronics, and jewellery.

Palladium in a sentence

• The catalytic converter relies on a thin coating of palladium to clean the exhaust.

• The price of palladium overtook that of gold during the supply shortage.

Where does palladium come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word descends from the Greek Palladion, the name given to a small carved image of the goddess Pallas Athena that, according to legend, kept the city of Troy safe for as long as it remained inside the walls. Pallas was a title of Athena, so a palladion was literally 'a thing belonging to Pallas', and from this came the broader English sense of any object or institution regarded as a safeguard or protection. English took the word up in this protective meaning during the 1600s, drawing on the Latin form palladium. Much later, in 1803, the chemist William Hyde Wollaston isolated a new silvery metal and named it palladium after the asteroid Pallas, which had itself been discovered the year before and named for the same goddess. That double journey, from a protective idol to a modern precious metal, explains why one short word covers two very different ideas, and the -ium ending on the metal simply follows the usual pattern for chemical elements.

How the word is built

• Pallad- (from Pallas, the goddess Pallas Athena)
• -ium (Latin noun suffix; for the metal, the standard chemical-element ending)