Is it Aluminum or Aluminium? For me it is Aluminum.

I am getting annoyed being corrected by my husband about this…

How about you?

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

Other than the US, it is "Aluminium" to be conformant with the naming convention of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (I guess metals which aren't known to the ancients have the -ium ending, like Radium, Uranium, Plutonium, Niobium, Einsteinium, Yttrium, Erbium, Terbium, ...).

SomeMichGuy · M

Oh, and YES, @BloviatingBuffoon, I hate it when YOUR husband corrects ME! 😉🤣🤣🤣

SomeMichGuy · M

And the article at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_of_chemical_elements has more info about element names and controversies, and the document by the IUPAC (the acronym for that "International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry"; don't confuse it with the IUPAP, the "International Union of Pure and Applied Physics"...but you'd never do that, right? 😉) is in footnote 40:

It's only 5 pp. long, and one of those is the title page, and the last is more than half references, so it's actually UNDER three-and-a-half pages.

BloviatingBuffoon · F

@SomeMichGuy the funny thing is I have a degree in Chemistry and he doesn’t have one 🙃

SomeMichGuy · M

@BloviatingBuffoon Ok, forget him. I have various degrees, incl. one in Physics.

You knew what I was talking about with the IUPAC/IUPAP. 🥰🥰🥰

And my mouth feels wrong saying Aluminium...! lol

BloviatingBuffoon · F

@SomeMichGuy it is a European thing…and I am not European 🤷🏻‍♀

SomeMichGuy · M

@BloviatingBuffoon It's got a complicated history, but--oddly enough!--you can blame Humphry Davy (yes, the British chemist!) for getting this started. (See the wikipedia article for "Aluminium".)

Also an oddity mentioned in that article us that scientists in the US used "-ium" from the beginning.

I think Davy was copied by IBM when they developed EBCDIC when ASCII was already around, free, and better. lol