居里 (jūlǐ): curie (Ci) — unit of radioactiv…

Meanings

1 curie (Ci) — unit of radioactivity (loanword)
2 (as proper noun, capitalized Jūlǐ) Curie, the surname of the Polish-French physicists Marie and Pierre Curie

Characters

居

jū

to reside (transliteration character for 'cu')

里

lǐ

inside; village (transliteration character for 'rie')

Examples

这块矿石的放射性约为一居里。

Zhè kuài kuàngshí de fàngshèxìng yuē wèi yī jūlǐ.

The radioactivity of this ore is about one curie.

居里夫人发现了镭。

Jūlǐ fūrén fāxiànle léi.

Madame Curie discovered radium.

Tips

history

The unit and the surname share a writing because the curie was named after Marie Curie (玛丽·居里, Marie Curie, 1867–1934) and Pierre Curie (皮埃尔·居里). 居 (jū) and 里 (lǐ) here are pure phonetic transliteration ('cu-rie'), but they happen to mean 'reside / inside-the-village' in Chinese — sometimes mis-parsed by learners as a regular compound.

culture

居里夫人 (Madame Curie) is one of the most famous female scientists in Chinese science textbooks — the first person to win two Nobel Prizes (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911).