Sodium

How to spell sodium

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce sodium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sodium mean?

1. nounA soft, silvery metallic chemical element (symbol Na) that reacts strongly with water and forms common salts.

Sodium in a sentence

• The nutrition label lists the sodium content per serving.

• Common table salt is a compound of sodium and chlorine.

Where does sodium come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Sodium takes its name from soda, the old word for sodium carbonate and related alkaline substances used in glassmaking and cleaning. Soda itself reached English through medieval Latin and may ultimately trace to the Arabic suwwad, the name of a saltwort plant whose ashes were burned to make the compound. When the English chemist Humphry Davy first isolated the silvery metal by electrolysis in 1807, he coined 'sodium' by attaching the Latinate ending -ium, which had become the standard way to label metallic elements such as potassium and calcium. That is why the international chemical symbol for the element is Na rather than So: it comes instead from natrium, the Latin name derived from natron, a naturally occurring soda mineral. The spelling is regular and phonetic, so the only real trap is remembering the unstressed 'i' in the middle, since the word is said in three syllables with that vowel reduced.

How the word is built

• sod- (from soda, the alkaline compound)
• -ium (suffix naming a metallic chemical element)