Origin and history of wolfram

1680s as the name of a type of steel-gray metal, from German kobold "household goblin" (13c.), which became also a Harz Mountains silver miners' term for rock laced with arsenic and sulfur (according to OED so called because it degraded the ore and made the miners ill), from Middle High German kobe "hut, shed" + *holt "goblin," from hold "gracious, friendly," a euphemistic word for a troublesome being.

The metallic element (closely resembling nickel but much rarer) was extracted from this rock. It was known to Paracelsus, but discovery is usually credited to the Swede George Brandt (1733), who gave it the name. Extended to a blue color 1835 (a mineral containing it had been used as a blue coloring for glass since 16c.). Compare nickel. Related: Cobaltic; cobaltous.

rare metallic element, noted for its hardness, 1796, from Swedish tungsten "calcium tungstate," coined 1780 by its discoverer, Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) from tung "heavy" + sten "stone" (see stone (n.)).

The word was used earlier as the name for calcium tungstate (1770). The atomic symbol W is from Latin wolframium, from German Wolfram "iron tungstate" (see wolfram). Related: Tungstate; tungstenic; tungstite; tungstous.

twenty-third letter of the modern English alphabet; one of the most recent additions to it.

It was not a character in the Phoenician, Greek or Roman alphabets, but the Modern English sound it represents is close to the devocalized consonant expressed by Roman -U- or -V-. In Old English, this originally was written -uu-, but by 8c. began to be expressed by the runic character wyn (Kentish wen), which looked thus: ƿ (the character is a late addition to the online font set and doesn't display properly on many computers).

After the Conquest, in 11c., Norman scribes introduced -w-, a ligatured doubling of Roman -u- which had been used on the continent for the Germanic "w" sound. Wyn disappeared c. 1300.

-W- is not properly a letter in the modern alphabet of French, which uses it only in borrowed foreign words such as wagon, weekend, Western, whisky, wombat. Charles Mackay ("Extraordinary Popular delusions and the Madness of Crowds") reports that the Scotsman John Law, author of the Mississippi stock swindle of 1720, was known in France as Monsieur Lass "to avoid the ungallic sound, aw."

As the atomic symbol of tungsten, it represents Latin wolframium, from German Wolfram "iron tungstate" (see wolfram).