Silicon

How to spell silicon

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce silicon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does silicon mean?

1. nounA hard, brittle chemical element (symbol Si) that is abundant in sand and rock and is used to make semiconductors and computer chips.

Silicon in a sentence

• The microprocessor is etched onto a thin wafer of silicon.

• Sand is largely made up of silicon combined with oxygen.

Where does silicon come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin silex, with the stem silic-, which literally meant 'flint' or 'hard stone', the kind of stone that ancient builders and toolmakers prized. The element itself was isolated in the early nineteenth century, and the Scottish chemist Thomas Thomson coined the modern name around 1817, taking the silic- root and adding the ending -on so that the word would sit neatly alongside the names of the neighbouring nonmetals boron and carbon. The choice of root was apt, since silicon is the main component of silica, the substance of sand, quartz and ordinary glass. The closely related word silica had already entered scientific English from the same Latin source, so the spelling trap is partly historical: the -on ending marks the element, while the look-alike word silicone (with a final e) names a family of synthetic polymers and is a separate term entirely. Keeping that final e straight is the chief difficulty, because the element and the rubbery material are constantly confused.

How the word is built

• silic- (from Latin silex/silicis: flint, hard stone)
• -on (nonmetal element suffix, by analogy with boron and carbon)