Tungsten

How to spell tungsten

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tungsten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tungsten mean?

1. nounA hard, dense, grey metallic element with an extremely high melting point, used in light-bulb filaments, cutting tools, and alloys.

Tungsten in a sentence

• The old bulb relied on a thin tungsten filament that glowed when heated.

• Machinists prize tungsten for drill bits because it stays hard at high temperatures.

Where does tungsten come from?

Language of origin: Other

Tungsten comes straight from Swedish, where 'tung sten' literally means 'heavy stone', a fitting name for one of the densest metals known. The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele first identified the acid of the metal in 1781, working from a heavy mineral now called scheelite, and the borrowed Swedish phrase entered English in the late 1700s as a single word. Confusingly, in Swedish itself 'tungsten' originally referred to that mineral rather than to the metal, and other languages took a different route entirely: German and many European tongues call the element 'wolfram', which is why its chemical symbol is the unexpected 'W'. The metal was actually isolated in 1783 by the Spanish brothers Juan Jose and Fausto Elhuyar. For an English speller the trap is purely the buried Swedish roots, since the silent logic of 'heavy stone' is hidden inside an unfamiliar-looking word.

How the word is built

• tung (Swedish: heavy)
• sten (Swedish: stone)