Periodic table of abbreviations

I just updated my earlier post on chemical element abbreviations by adding a table to visualize the groupings, a sort of periodic table of element abbreviations. See that post for details.

  1. First letter
  2. First two letters
  3. First letter and next consonant
  4. Initials of first and second syllables
  5. Initials of first and third syllables
  6. First and last letter
  7. First letter and something else
  8. Historical

2 thoughts on “Periodic table of abbreviations

  1. John, why do you call column VII “historical”? Wouldn’t it depend on the language? For example, in French, many of the elements in Column VII would be in other columns, and N would have to be Column VII. But I don’t think the French should say N is “historical” for them. It’s just another language source, as you pointed out in your other post.

  2. I tried to come up with a succinct way to label that column. I chose “historical” because many of the elements were abbreviated based on Latin names because they were identified a long time ago when Latin was dominant. The oddball in that column is tungsten since wolfram is not Latin. That’s an anglo-centric perspective, but this page is blatantly anglo-centric. :)

Comments are closed.