Four New Words

rogersgeorge on June 23rd, 2016

New words often appear more or less spontaneously from popular culture, but in scientific circles it’s not uncommon to make new words deliberately. Mostly, I think, by naming things such as newly-discovered species and objects out in space.

The technical term for a new word, by the way, is neologism.

Chemists do this, too. Recently they manufactured a few atoms of each of four new elements, so naturally they want to name the elements. We don’t have a drawn-up list of element names like the National Hurricane Center does for hurricanes, and the chemists wait until they have at least a few of the atoms in existence (even if they last only a small fraction of a second) before naming them. And then they formalize the naming by presenting proposed names for public review before the names become official. Whew! At least in biology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it.

Here are our four new words. I don’t anticipate any problems with their acceptance.

New Element Names

Here’s the site I stole this info from: http://www.compoundchem.com/2016/06/08/new-element-names/. If you want it from the horse’s mouth, visit the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s website.

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