The word tungsten entered English in the late 18th century, borrowed from Swedish tungsten, a compound of tung meaning heavy and sten meaning stone. The name was originally applied not to the metallic element but to the mineral now known as scheelite (calcium tungstate), a notably dense stone first described by the Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt in 1757. The element isolated from this mineral inherited the mineral's Swedish name in English, though most other languages call it wolfram.
The two components of tungsten trace back through Swedish to Proto-Germanic. Tung derives from Proto-Germanic *thungaz meaning heavy, which is related to Old English thunge, though this Old English word did not survive into modern English. Sten derives from Proto-Germanic *stainaz meaning stone, from PIE *stey- meaning to stiffen or to congeal, a root that also produced English stone and German Stein. The compound tungsten thus preserves two ancient Germanic roots in a transparent descriptive formation
The element's discovery involved an unusual naming conflict that persists to this day. In 1781, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele analyzed the mineral tungsten (scheelite) and identified a new acid within it. In 1783, the Spanish chemists Juan Jose and Fausto Elhuyar isolated the metallic element from a different mineral, wolframite, and named it wolfram after the mineral. The name wolfram comes from German, where it was a tin miners' term for the unwanted mineral that interfered with tin smelting, literally wolf's froth or wolf's cream, from Wolf meaning wolf and Rahm meaning cream. The miners regarded the mineral as a pest that devoured
The result is that the element has two names in international use. English and French use tungsten, preserving the Swedish mineral name. German, Spanish, Russian, and most other languages use wolfram, preserving the Elhuyar brothers' choice. The element's chemical symbol W comes from wolfram. The International Union of Pure and Applied
The cognates of tungsten's components are straightforward. English stone and Swedish sten are cognates from Proto-Germanic *stainaz. German Stein is a third cognate. The heavy element, tung, is more isolated in modern languages: Old English thunge did not survive, and the modern English word heavy comes from a different Proto-Germanic root (*habigaz). German schwer and Dutch zwaar, both meaning
In modern English, tungsten refers to the chemical element with atomic number 74, symbol W. It has the highest melting point of any element at 3,422 degrees Celsius and the highest boiling point at 5,555 degrees Celsius. These properties made it indispensable for incandescent light bulb filaments, a use pioneered in the early 1900s that dominated tungsten's economic significance for over a century. Tungsten carbide, an extremely hard compound, is used in cutting