Why do Americans spell and say aluminium as aluminum?
Is aluminum incorrect?
Who's right, the British or Americans?
Should it be called aluminium or aluminum?
And, is it ok to use the suffix -um instead of -ium in the first place?
This causes a lot of debates!
I know that British folks love to tell us Americans how we get words wrong and how dumb
we are.
I understand!
But we aren't so dumb as you think we are!
We're just stubborn.
The person who discovers an element gets to name it.
The discoverer of the element aluminium or aluminum was Sir Humphrey Davy.
To be clear, Davy just discovered the presence of the element
in a base that was already known to the Ancient Greeks and which had been named alum.
The element wasn't isolated until later, in 1825.
Davy, at first was undecided on which to call it.
He first named it aluminium.
Then, a bit later, he decided to call it aluminum.
Then, he later changed it back to aluminium.
Hey, he gets to name it.
He finally did decided on aluminium so that's the name, right?
Well, sure...
But, once he first changed the name to aluminum a number of trade magazines in the U.S. adopted
this name.
So, perhaps due to editorial decisions and perhaps the choices of aluminum trading companies,
who for whatever reason, like aluminum better than aluminium, the name stuck in America.
The scientific world and other countries besides America used aluminium.
So that's pretty much why we call it aluminum in America.
But, some people say that we Americans are so dumb we don't even realize that the suffix
-um is incorrect!
Well, tell that to Sir Humphrey Davy.
And also, tell it to the Romans.
You know, those Latin-speaking people, the one's who came up with all this um and ium
stuff?
The fact is there are other elements that do use the suffix -um instead of -ium: molybdenum,
tantalum, platinum, and lanthanum.
And the Romans had -um names for some of our more familiar metals.
Plumbum for lead, stannum for tin, ferrum for iron, etc.
This is where we get the abbreviations for them, like Sn for stannum, or tin and Pb for
plumbum, or lead.
Seems the Romans themselves had no problem with um...um.
Unless you look very deeply, which I doubt most people will want to do, you will find
little logical consistency in the way elements are named.
What we can say is that -ium has been pretty much decided on as the de facto suffix for
elements named in the 19th century.
This would mean that aluminium was more consistent with that naming pattern.
But this -ium decision also breaks earlier naming patterns, such as naming noble gases
with an -on.
Helium is a noble gas but it's not called helon.
Then we have oxygen and nitrogen.
It gets really confusing and the particular reasons for the different naming patterns,
while I did begin to research them, quite frankly, they bore me so suspected they'd
bore you, too.
But let's just agree that aluminium and aluminum both have a right to exist.
And it's easier to say aluminum foil than aluminium foil.
I'm just sayin.
Maybe that's why some British folks still carry on with tin foil even though it's not
made out of tin anymore.
Hmmm...whose dumb now?
No, no.
I'm kidding!
I'll admit my mom and my grandmother used to call aluminum foil tin foil too.
And some folks in America still do.
And we still say tin foil hat even though you would make one out of aluminum.
But, here is the thing.
The word aluminium just sounds very strange to our American ears.
You can't convince us aluminium sounds right any more than we can convince you that aluminum
sounds right.
Let's just all just agree that aluminum foil is much better than tin foil.
And it is.
Way better.