A chunk of antimony mined in Andalusia, Spain
20 January 2023
Antimony, atomic number 51, is a lustrous, gray metalloid. The element has been known since antiquity, but the name dates to the medieval period. In classical Latin, the element was called stibium, hence its atomic symbol of Sb. The medieval Latin antimonium is of unknown origin but was probably taken from an unidentified Arabic word into medieval Latin and thence into English. Antimonium was used by Constantinus Africanus of Salerno in the eleventh century and the word appears in Gilbertus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century Compendium medicinae.
The word appears in English c.1425 in the Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale angl.25):
Antymoyne is a myne colde in þe firste degre, drye in þe secounde degree.
(Antimony is a cold mineral in the first degree, dry in the second degree.)
In using colde, Guy is associating the mineral with the elements of earth and water and the humors of phlegm and black bile. And in using drye he is associating the mineral with earth and fire and choler and melancholy.
I usually don’t like to refer to a false etymology unless it is one that has some popular currency and needs to be debunked, but Samuel Johnson gives a delightfully incorrect origin for antimony in his 1755 dictionary:
The reason of its modern denomination is referred to Basil Valentine, a German monk; who, as the tradition relates, having thrown some of it to the hogs, observed, that, after it had purged them heartily, they immediately fattened; and therefore, he imagined, his fellow monks would be the better for a like dose. The experiment, however, succeeded so ill, that they all died of it; and the medicine was thenceforward called antimoine; antimonk.
I believe that Johnson knew full well that the etymology was bogus, but he just couldn’t resist it. Neither could I.
Sources:
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. antimonium, n.. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 of 2. London: W. Strahan, 1755, s.v. antimony, n. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Online.
Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. stibium, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. antimonie, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. antimony, n.
Image credit: Robert Lavinsky, before 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.