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lanthanide

/ˈlænθənaɪd/noun

lanthanide is a noun meaning “Any of the 15 rare earth elements from lanthanum to lutetium in the periodic table; because their outermost orbitals are not filled, they have very…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled L-A-N-T-H-A-N-I-D-E, and it appears about once in every 13 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of lanthanide is lanthanides.

What does lanthanide mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Any of the 15 rare earth elements from lanthanum to lutetium in the periodic table; because their outermost orbitals are not filled, they have very similar chemistry; below them are the actinides.

  2. 2

    Any of the 14 rare earth elements from lanthanum to ytterbium (lutetium is excluded by some authors as it is a d-block rather than an f-block element).

  3. 3

    datedAny of the 14 rare earth elements from cerium to lutetium (lanthanum having been excluded because it was thought to be a d-block element in the past).

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

How do you pronounce lanthanide?

  • /ˈlænθənaɪd/

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

Forms of lanthanide

  • lanthanides plural

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

How common is lanthanide?

Lanthanide appears about once in every 13 million words in written English, the 107,757th 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).

Lanthanide in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense A subset of the rare-earth elements:

LanguageWords
Frenchlanthanide
GermanLanthanoid
Spanishlantánido

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 lanthanide come from?

From lanthanium + -ide.

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