A roll of aluminum foil
30 June 2023
Of all the chemical elements, aluminum, or aluminium, probably holds the title for the most variations on its name throughout history. You may be familiar with the split between aluminum (the United States) and aluminium (Britain), but the tale of the element’s name in English is far more complex.
At the root of the name is alum, the hydrated double sulfate salt of aluminum, usually formed with potassium but it can also be formed with sodium or ammonium. The word is also used for salts that replace aluminum with other metals, such as chromium. Alum has been known since antiquity and has myriad industrial uses. Consumers are most likely to encounter it as an astringent or as a styptic to stop minor bleeding, such as shaving nicks.
There is an Old English word for alum that appears four times in the extant corpus, all four in glosses of the Latin alumen. The Old English word is ælifne. The -lif- refers to the liver or blood, and the adjective lifrig means clotted, so ælifne refers to alum’s function as a styptic. But the Old English word did not survive into Middle English.
Instead, our Present-Day English use of alum comes from the Anglo-Norman, and the word appears in John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), written sometime before 1398. This particular passage is about the source of various liquids found in nature:
And som licour is ypressed and wronge out of fruyt of trees […] And some comeþ by grete craft and brennyng […] And som comeþ of the iuys of herbes […] And some comeþ of þe dewe of heuene þat falleþ on floures […] And som cometh of veynes of þe erþe, as water of salt welles and water nitrum and alime and other.
(And some liquor is pressed and wrung out of the fruit of trees […] And some comes with great strength and burning […] And some comes from the juice of herbs […] And some comes from the dew of heaven that falls on flowers […] And some comes from veins of the earth, as water of salt wells and soft water and alum and other [substances].)
Anglicus’s Latin used the word alumen, and the spelling alumen, taken directly from the Latin, also appears in Middle English by the early fifteenth century.
With the appearance of chemistry, as we know the science today, in the late eighteenth century, English chemists took to calling aluminum oxide alumine. That name first appears in 1788 as a borrowing from French. And in 1790, the term alumina began to replace alumine. Alumina is borrowed from Latin and continues in use to this day as a name for aluminum oxide. Also proposed, albeit unsuccessfully, as names for the oxide were arga and argil.
It was chemist Humphry Davy who coined the name for the metal itself. In an 1808 paper he called it alumium, although since he had not been successful in isolating the metal he did not formally propose it as a name:
Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium.
Others, however, did not take up the name in great numbers.
Aluminium appears in a summary of one of Davy’s lectures, although Davy did not use that spelling himself in either the lecture or the subsequent paper, using alumine instead. But the relevant passage from the summary of the lecture, published in January 1811, reads:
Potassium, acting upon alumine and glucine, produces pyrophoric substances of a dark grey colour, which burnt, throwing off brilliant sparks, and leaving behind alkali and earth, and which, when thrown into water, decomposed it with great violence. The result of this experiment is not wholly decisive as to the existence of what might be called aluminium and glucinium.
Jöns Jacob Berzelius would use aluminium in an 1811 paper (in French), and that spelling was rapidly taken up by chemists. The following year, Davy would revise the spelling, but instead opting for the novel spelling aluminum. From his 1812 Elements of Chemical Philosophy:
7. Aluminum.
1. When a solution of ammonia or of potassa, not in excess, is thrown into a solution of alum, a substance falls down, which when well washed and dried at a red heat, is alumina. This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metallline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina.
Aluminum would not be isolated until the 1820s, however. And by then, both aluminum and aluminium were in widespread use.
Both aluminum and aluminium remained in use in both Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century, but the usage started diverging by the end of that century. In the twentieth century, aluminum became the dominant form in North America, with the American Chemical Society standardizing that spelling in 1925. But in Britain and elsewhere in the Anglophone world, aluminium became preferred spelling. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) standardized that spelling in 1990.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. alum, n.
Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia” (30 June 1808). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98.98, December 1808, 333–70 at 353.
———. Elements of Chemical Philosophy, vol. 1. London: J. Johnson, 1812, 354–55. Smithsonian Libraries.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. ælifn, ælefne.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. alum, n., alumen, n.
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2012, s.v. aluminum, n. and adj., aluminium, n. and adj., alumium, n., alumine, n., alumina, n., alum, n.1., alumen, n.; second edition, 1989, arga, n., argil, n.
“The Rakerian Lecture for 1809.” The Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature, 22.1, January 1811. London: J. Mawman, 1811, 3–10 at 9. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 2 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 2.19.53, 1318.
Photo Credit: MdeVincente, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.