Zinc

How to spell zinc

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce zinc

What does zinc mean?

1. nounA bluish-white metallic chemical element used in galvanising, alloys such as brass, and dietary supplements.

Zinc in a sentence

• The steel fence was coated with zinc to stop it rusting.

• Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc.

Where does zinc come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the German Zink, a name that the alchemist Paracelsus put into print in the 1500s. It is most likely derived from the German Zinke, meaning a 'prong', 'point', or 'tooth', a reference to the jagged, tooth-like crystals that form when molten zinc cools in the smelting furnace. English adopted the term in the early 1700s as the metal became commercially important, keeping the German spelling almost unchanged. The metal itself had been worked far earlier in India and China, but the European name and its spelling are firmly Germanic. The unusual ending, where a 'c' produces a hard 'k' sound after the 'n', is exactly the spelling trap, since writers are tempted to add a 'k' or to write 'zink' as it sounds.

How the word is built

• zinc (single root; an unanalysable element name borrowed whole, with no prefix or suffix)