chalcogen
/ˈkælkəd͡ʒən/noun
chalcogen is a noun meaning “Any element of group 16 of the periodic table: oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium or polonium” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-H-A-L-C-O-G-E-N, and it appears about once in every 71 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of chalcogen is chalcogens.
What does chalcogen mean?
noun
- 1
Any element of group 16 of the periodic table: oxygen, sulfur, selenium, tellurium or polonium.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce chalcogen?
- US /ˈkælkəd͡ʒən/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Tesco250-chalcogen.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of chalcogen
- chalcogens plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is chalcogen?
Chalcogen appears about once in every 71 million words in written English, the 265,644th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Chalcogen in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense any element of group 16 of the periodic table:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | chalcogène |
| Portuguese | calcogénio, calcogênio |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does chalcogen come from?
From chalco- (“ore”) + -gen (“forming”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).