hafnium
/ˈhæfniəm/noun
hafnium is a noun meaning “A chemical element (symbol Hf) with an atomic number of 72: a lustrous, silvery-grey tetravalent transition metal” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled H-A-F-N-I-U-M and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 13 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does hafnium mean?
noun
- 1
A chemical element (symbol Hf) with an atomic number of 72: a lustrous, silvery-grey tetravalent transition metal.
- 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 hafnium?
- /ˈhæfniəm/
Hafnium has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vininn126-hafnium.wav, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-hafnium.wav, LL-Q1860_(eng)-Tesco250-hafnium.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
How common is hafnium?
Hafnium appears about once in every 13 million words in written English, the 106,501st 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).
Hafnium in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense chemical element:
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 hafnium come from?
From Latin Hafnia (“Copenhagen”) + -ium.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).