铊 (tā): thallium (chemical element, sym…

Meanings

1 thallium (chemical element, symbol Tl, atomic number 81)

Characters

铊

tā

thallium (chemical element)

Examples

铊是一种有毒的重金属。

Tā shì yī zhǒng yǒudú de zhòngjīnshǔ.

Thallium is a toxic heavy metal.

铊中毒曾被用于谋杀。

Tā zhòngdú céng bèi yòngyú móushā.

Thallium poisoning has been used in murders.

Tips

culture

铊 (thallium) became notorious in China through the 1994 Zhu Ling case (朱令案), in which a Tsinghua University student was poisoned with thallium by a classmate, becoming one of China's most famous criminal cases.

Components

radical

钅 jīn

metal (radical form of 金)

Left-side metal radical - the side form of 金 squeezed into five strokes. It is the standard left-position element used to coin chemistry names: 铜 copper, 铁 iron, 银 silver, 锌 zinc. Here it tags 铊 as a metallic element, fitting thallium's place on the periodic table.

phonetic

它 tā

it

Right side 它 supplies the sound - tā read straight across with no shift, matching the third-person inanimate pronoun. This is a modern coinage: chemists picked the closest-sounding common character to spell the element name Tl. The pairing is purely phonetic, no semantic flavor carried over.