Technical English – Chemical Elements

This time we’ll be talking about chemical elements. Maybe it’s said too much, we’ll just list them all along with their pronunciation so that you know how to pronounce them correctly.

This article comes from issue 2 (1/2023) of Your American English Magazine. You’ll find much more interesting stuff there, I’m sure.

As you know, chemical elements are organized in the so-called periodic table. Each element has its unique symbol and atomic number. The atomic number tells us how many protons there are in the nucleus of that particular element. Usually, you can find much more information about each element in the periodic table, but for our purposes and to keep things tidy, let’s limit ourselves to these two pieces of information, so the element symbol and the atomic number. This is what you can see in the periodic table below.

So, if you look at the very first element, which is hydrogen, you can see its symbol H and atomic number 1. For oxygen it’s respectively O and 8. So now that you know how to find the elements in the periodic table, let’s have a look at them one by one. In the table below you can see the atomic number in the first column, the symbol of the element in the second column, its name in the third column and the pronunciation of its name in the last column.

So, here are the chemical elements:

Now you’ll know how to pronounce the names of all chemical elements, some of which are not pronounced in the most obvious way.