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curium

cur·i·um/ˈkjʊ.ɹi.əm/noun

curium is a noun meaning “A radioactive and highly fissile, silver-grey, metallic, transuranic chemical element (symbol Cm) with an atomic number of 96, which is artificially…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-U-R-I-U-M and has 3 syllables (cur·i·um), and it appears about once in every 22 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does curium mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A radioactive and highly fissile, silver-grey, metallic, transuranic chemical element (symbol Cm) with an atomic number of 96, which is artificially produced in a particle accelerator.

  2. 2

    An atom of this element.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce curium?

  • /ˈkjʊə.ɹi.əm/
  • /ˈkjɔː.ɹi.əm/
  • US /ˈkjʊ.ɹi.əm/

Curium has 3 syllables, split cur·i·um in writing.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-curium.wav, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-curium.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

How common is curium?

Curium appears about once in every 22 million words in written English, the 143,405th 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).

Curium in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense chemical element with an atomic number of 96:

LanguageWords
Frenchcurium
GermanCurium
Portuguesecúrio
Spanishcurio

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 curium come from?

From Curie + -ium (suffix forming names of metallic elements), coined by the American scientists Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–1999), Ralph A. James (1920–1973), and Albert Ghiorso (1915–2010), who synthesized the element in 1944 and named it in honour of Pierre Curie (1859–1906) and Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867–1934) who, with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries in radioactivity.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).