Boron
24 March 2023
Boron is brittle, lustrous metalloid with the atomic number five and the symbol B. Its salt, borax, has been known since antiquity, but its pure form wasn’t isolated and recognized as an element until chemist Humphry Davy did so in 1807. Davy initially proposed the name boracium, but redubbed it boron upon concluding the -um ending was inappropriate for a non-metal.
The name comes from the Medieval Latin borax and the Old French boreis. The Latin word is borrowed from the Arabic البورق (buraq), which comes from the Persian بوراکس (bura). In medieval use, borax could refer to a variety of similar minerals, not just the hydrated borate of sodium, which is the Present-Day technical definition of the word.
The Middle English form of the name, boras, appears by the 1380s in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. In his description of the Summoner, Chaucer says that borax is one of the substances that could not cure the skin disease the man suffers from:
A somonour was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face,
For saucefleem he was, with eyen narwe.
As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake and piled berd.
Of his visage children were aferd.
Ther nas quyk-silver, lytarge, ne brymstoon,
Boras, ceruce, ne oille of tartre noon,
Ne oynement that wolde clense and byte,
That hym myghte helpen of his whelkes white,
Nor of the knobbes sittynge on his chekes.(A summoner was there with us in that place,
Who had a fire-red cherubim’s face,
For he was leprous, with swollen eyelids.
He was as hot and lecherous as a sparrow,
With scabby, black eyebrows and depilated beard,
Of his visage, children were afraid.
There was no mercury, lead monoxide, nor sulfur,
Nor any borax, white lead, nor oil of tarter,
No ointment that would cleanse and bite,
That might help him with his white pimples,
Or with the knobs sitting on his cheeks.)
The name of the element itself was coined in 1812, five years after its discovery. That year, Davy wrote of the coinage:
In my first paper on this substance I named it boracium, for I supposed that in its pure form it would be found to be metallic; subsequent experiments have not justified this conjecture. It is more analogous to carbon than to any other substance; and I venture to propose Boron as a more unexceptionable name; the termination in um having been long used as characteristic of a metal. M.M. Gay Lussac and Thenard have proposed to call it Bore, a word that cannot with propriery be adopted in our language, though short and appropriate in the French nomenclature.
Sources:
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 630–33. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Davy, Humphry. Elements of Chemical Philosophy, part 1, vol. 1. Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1812, 178. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. borax. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. boras, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. boron, n., borax, n., boracium, n.
Image credit: James L. Marshall, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boron_R105.jpg Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
