Platinum

How to spell platinum

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce platinum

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does platinum mean?

1. nounA dense, silvery-white precious metal valued for jewellery, catalysts, and industrial use.
2. adjectiveHaving a pale silvery colour, or denoting a premium top tier of status or achievement.

Platinum in a sentence

• noun

  The wedding band was made of solid platinum rather than gold.

• adjective

  She dyed her hair a striking platinum blonde for the summer.

• noun

  Catalytic converters rely on platinum to reduce harmful exhaust emissions.

• adjective

  The album went platinum within a month of its release.

Where does platinum come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Platinum takes its name from the Spanish word platina, a diminutive of plata meaning 'silver', so the original sense was something like 'little silver' or 'lesser silver'. Spanish colonists encountered the metal in the rivers of South America in the 1500s and 1600s, where it appeared as troublesome whitish grains mixed in with gold, and they named it platina del Pinto after the Pinto River region. Far from prizing it, early miners regarded it as a nuisance because it was hard to work and resembled an inferior silver. When the metal was studied scientifically in the 1700s, the name was Latinised to platinum to match other element names such as 'aurum' for gold, and English adopted that form. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: the stressed first syllable 'plat' is followed by the unstressed 'in-um', so writers must remember it ends in -inum, not -inium like aluminium.

How the word is built

• platin- (from Spanish platina, little silver)
• -um (Latinate element suffix)