hotshot

1935 publicity photo of the Hoosier Hot Shots musical quartet for NBC’s National Barn Dance radio program (which was a forerunner of the more famous Grand Ole Opry); the character of Uncle Ezra, played by Pat Barnett, is on the left

9 September 2024

Perhaps the most common sense of hotshot today is that of a very capable person, especially one who is brash and flashy, but the word has had a variety of meanings over the centuries. The underlying metaphor underneath all the senses, however, is that of a bullet, warm from having been fired.

Hotshot first appears at the close of the sixteenth century in the sense of a reckless person. We see it in George Peele’s 1593 The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First, when it is used in the context of someone whose courage in battle comes out of a bottle:

Friar. Come boie we must buckle I see,
The prince is of my profession right:
Rather than he wil lose his wenche,
He will fight Ab ouo vsque ad mala.

Nouice. O maister doubt you not but your Nouice will prooue a whot shot, with a bottle of Metheglin.

(Ab ovo usque ad mala literally means “from egg to fruit,” a metaphorical reference to dinner courses, equivalent to our present-day from soup to nuts; the locus classicus is Horace’s Satire 3. Metheglin is a variety of spiced mead, a word borrowed from Welsh.)

But at about the same time, appearing in print a few years after Peele’s Chronicle, the term is used to refer to a skilled lover. We see it in John Marston’s play The Malcontent, published in 1604:

Bili[oso]. Mary my good Lord quoth hee, your Lordship shall euer finde amongst a hundred French-men, fortie hot shottes: amongst a hundred Spaniardes, threescore bragarts: amongst a hundred Dutch-men, fourescore drunkardes: amongst a hundred English-men, fourescore and ten mad-men: and amongst an hundred Welch-men.

Bian[ca]. What my Lord?

Bili. Fourescore and nineteene gentlemen.

This sexual sense could be applied regardless of the person’s gender. This sense, however, fell out of use by the end of the seventeenth century. We see it again in the twentieth, but this later incarnation is undoubtedly a specific application of the more general one of a capable person that we’re familiar with today.

The capable-person sense is in place by the 1920s. Here’s an example from the Atlanta Journal of 4 February 1921:

Speaking of Mr. Ladue, this lively gentleman hails from Colgate university. His first name is Frederick, he being named after either Frederick the Great, Frederick the Saxon or Fred Fulton, I forget which. However that may be, he is a hot shot as a referee, and it is a delight to watch him run off a game. You never saw a fast basketball game until you see Mr. Ladue referee one. He demands an absolutely clean game with personal contact at a minimum.

There are undoubtedly earlier examples of this sense to be found, but it’s difficult to differentiate this sense from that of a literal heated bullet or the metaphorical and rhetorical equivalent. This literal sense of hot shot comes from the practice of heating cannon projectiles prior to firing in order to turn them into incendiary rounds. Such use could be particularly devastating in naval battles. This gunnery sense is recorded by 1666 when it appears in an anonymous poem about the death of Admiral Christopher Myngs from wounds he received in the Second Anglo-Dutch War:

No sooner had the black-mouth’d Ord’nance    (hot
With Hell-bred Flames, and big with Flemmish   shot)
Spit forth its Venim’d blasts, enough to make
The well compacted Universe to shake,
But straight the Waves (supposing thou wert dead)
Leapt up to catch the Airie Substance fled.

On the page, the parenthetical hot shot is split between the two lines. Grammatically it must be the subject of the adjective Flemmish, but to make the rhyme scheme work, hot and shot must be at the end of the two respective lines.

This literal gunnery sense is not the origin of the earlier capable-person sense, but both stem from a metaphor of a hot bullet. We do, however, see a metaphorical use of the literal gunnery sense to mean an barbed rhetorical utterance. Playwright Aphra Behn uses this metaphorical sense in her 1681 The Second Part of the Rover. The passage in question is an exchange between the title character and a Spanish courtesan who is in love with him:

Will[more]. My fair false Sybil, what Inspirations are you waiting from Heav’n, new Arts to cheat Mankind!—tell me, with what face canst thou be Devout, or ask any thing from thence who hast made so lewd a use of what it has already lavisht on thee?

La Nu[uche]. Oh my careless Rover! I perceive all your hot shot is not yet spent in Battel, you have a Volley in reserve for me still—Faith, Officer, the Town has wanted mirth in your absence.

This rhetorical sense of a barbed verbal volley remains in use today.

I’m not going to detail all the different senses of hot shot, but another one that is notable is that of dose of heroin or other drug that has been laced with poison. This sense is in place by 1936, when it is recorded in a glossary of underworld slang in the journal American Speech:

HOT SHOT. Cyanide or other fast-working poison concealed in dope to do away with a dangerous or troublesome addict. The hot shot kills the addict, in contrast to flipping him or taking him [i.e., rendering unconscious].

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Sources:

Behn, Aphra. The Second Part of the Rover. London: Jacob Tonson, 1681, 13. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Blake, Morgan. “Eddie Rawson Brilliant Hero in Red and Black’s Victory over Commodores.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 4 February 1921, 24/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. hot-shot, n.

Horace. Satire 3, lines 6–7. In Horace. Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry. H. R. Fairclough, trans. Loeb Classical Library 194. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1926, 32–33. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Marston, John (with additions by John Webster). The Malcontent. London: Valentine Simmes for William Aspley, 1604, sig. E3r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Maurer, David W. “The Argot of the Underworld Narcotic Addict.” American Speech, 11.2 (April 1936), 116–27 at 122/2. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. hotshot, n.

Peele, George. The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First. London: Abell Jeffes, 1593, sig. C3v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Upon the Death of the Truly Valiant and Magnanimous Sr. Christoph. Minns Wounded at Sea.” Oxford: Joseph Godwin, 1666. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Kaufman-Fabry, Chicago, photographers for NBC Radio, 1935. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

tantalum

1565 copy by Giulio Sanuto of lost painting by Titian depicting Tantalus reaching for fruit

6 September 2024

Tantalum is a chemical element with atomic number 73 and the symbol Ta. It is a hard, ductile, blue-gray transition metal. It has a high melting point and is corrosion resistant and relatively inert chemically, making it useful in reaction vessels, jet engines, nuclear reactors, and in capacitors for electronic equipment. The element was discovered in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg.

Tantalum is another element which takes its name from Greek mythology, but in this case the name is also a metaphor for one of its chemical properties. It is named for Tantalus, the king of Phrygia, who was punished by the gods for a number of crimes. He abused Zeus’s hospitality by, when invited to dine at Olympus, stealing nectar and ambrosia. And more gruesomely, he offered up his son Pelops as the main course at a banquet for the gods. Tantalus’s punishment in the afterlife was to forever stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Whenever he reached from the fruit, the branches would move out of his reach, and whenever he stooped to drink, the water would recede. The verb to tantalize also comes from his name.

Ekeberg named the element tantalum due to its resistance to acids. Like the mythological king’s inability to get a drink, the metal resists reacting to acids:

Tar jag mig den frihet, at gifva namn åt famillen. Sjelfva recruten bland metallerne kallar jag TANTALUM, dels för at fólja bruket, som gillar namn ur Mythologien, dess för at alludera på dess oförmögenhet at, midt i ôfverflödet af syra, dåraf taga något åt sig och måttas. Malmen, ſom består af Tantalum, Jårn, och Manganes, må heta Tantalit.

(I take the liberty of naming the family. The newcomer itself among the metals I call TANTALUM, partly to follow the practice, which likes names from mythology, partly to allude to its inability to, in the midst of an excess of acid, absorb any of it and be saturated. The ore, which consists of tantalum, iron, and manganese, may be called tantalite.)

It is chemically similar to niobium, and the two elements are frequently found together in ores. In myth, Niobe was the daughter of Tantalus.

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Sources:

Ekeberg, A. G. “Upplysning om Ytterjordens egenskaper, i synnerhet i jämförelse med Berylljorden: om de Fossilier, hvari förstnämnde jord innehålles, samt om en ny upptäckt kropp af metallisk natur.” Kongliga Vetenskaps Academiens Nya Handlingar, 23, 1802, 68–83 at 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tantalum, n.

Image credit: Giulio Sanuto, 1565. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

trek / Trekkie / Trekker

Two Trekers (or are they Trekkies?) at Heroes Con 2013

4 September 2024

Trekker and Trekkie mean the same thing, but the words have different connotations. Both refer to fans of the science fiction television show, and now movie franchise, Star Trek, which started airing on American television in 1966. The two terms are sometimes differentiated, however, in that a Trekker is a more serious and studious fan.

The word trek comes from the Dutch, meaning to pull or to journey, that is originally by horse-or ox-drawn wagon, or a noun meaning an act of pulling a wagon or taking such a journey. It comes into English via South Africa, with its mix of British and Dutch settler-colonists.

The earliest written appearances in English demonstrate a lack of familiarity with Dutch in that the word is spelled with an <a>. It appears in a 22 November 1820 letter by Thomas Philipps, one of the original British settler-colonists to the Cape Colony in 1820, as a command given to a draft animal to begin pulling:

A Dutchman never seems in a hurry, he carries his Mutton and dried beef and bread and his blanket in a large chest on which he sits to drive, and with his pipe jogs on contentedly, now and then calling out “Trac, Trac.”

And John Mitford Bowker, another early English settler-colonist, uses the verb in his journal of 25 September 1835 meaning to travel:

Making ready for to track have got no horses.

And we see the <e> spelling when Bowker uses the noun in a letter dated 7 May 1846:

We, all of us, have been sick more or less, for it is one thing to look to your concerns at home, and another to try to look to them in the camp, and also to do patrol duty by day and sentry duty at night. But enough of this. Here we are on trek; for with Skietkloof at our backs we could keep nothing.

And we see the verb with the <e> spelling in R. Gordon Cumming’s 1850 A Hunter’s Life in South Africa:

From time immemorial, these interesting and stupendous quadrupeds had maintained their ground throughout these their paternal domains, although they were constantly hunted, and numbers of them were slain, by the neighbouring active and athletic warriors of the Amaponda tribes, on account of their flesh—the ivory so much prized amongst civilized nations being by them esteemed of no value, the only purpose to which they adapt it being the manufacture of rings and ornaments for their fingers and arms. These gallant fellows, armed only with their assegais or light javelins of their own manufacture, were in the constant habit of attacking the gigantic animals, and overpowering them with the accumulated showers of their weapons. At length, however, when the white lords of the creation pitched their camps on the shores of Southern Africa, a more determined and general warfare was waged against the elephants on account of their ivory, with the more destructive engines of ball and powder. In a few years, those who managed to escape from the hands of their oppressors, after wandering from forest to forest, and from one mountain-range to another, and finding that sanctuary there was none, turned their faces to the north-east, and “trekked” or migrated from their ancestral jungles to lands unknown.

Jump forward a century or so, and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek aired its first episode on 8 September 1966. Trekker appears five months later in a headline assigned to a letter in TV Guide of 22 February 1967:

TREKKER

This is an appeal to the public to stand behind the only intellectually stimulating program NBC has come up with in years. Star Trek at least rises above the typical “father is a slob, mother is a scatterbrain, and the children triumph” programs that fill the prime time every night.

And a group of fans of the TV series from Trenton, New Jersey wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer, a portion of the letter appearing in the 5 April 1967 issue:

From “Trenton Trekkers”: “Thanks for your interview with William Shatner. As avid fans of “Star Trek,” we hope that you will write about our favorite, Leonard Nimoy, the magnificent Mr. Spock.”

Trekkie appears the following year in the fanzine Plak-Tow #8, dated June 1968, in a piece gushing about actor Mark Lenard, who played a Romulan commander and Spock’s father, Sarek, in the series:

I don't know about other people, but I'm afraid I was acting out of snobbery in cataloguing the roles I'd soon Mr. Lenard play when I sent him a fan letter—I'd wanted to make it clear I wasn't just a trekkie in love with Spock and therefore with all things Vulcan, especially Spock's father, but rather a sophisticated, mature admirer of good acting wherever it appears. Which I hope is true—but I'm in love with Sarek anyway.

And

His great, warm brown eyes are guaranteed to melt any trekkie into a helpless pool of protoplasm.

The distinction between Trekker and Trekkie dates to at least 1970, when it appears in the fanzine Deck 6:

If you object to opinions expressed or statements made in DECK 6, please don’t blame the “Deck 6 gang.” With the exception of issue #1 (which was written by Ellen), I’m responsible. Any contributions by the rest of the gang will be so labeled, so if you’re planning to hit anyone, better aim at me. The gang is a definite help, though—they keep my spirits up, and beat me down when I start acting like a bubble-headed trekkie (rather than a sober, dignified—albeit enthusiastic—trekker).

So, when in doubt as to which word to use, go with Trekker. A Trekkie won’t be insulted, but the reverse is not the case.

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Sources:

Berman, Ruth and Dorothy Jones. “A Mid-Spring’s Night’s Dream, or, Journey to Backstage.” Plak-Tow, 8, June 1968. Fanlore.org.

Bowker, John Mitford. Letter, 7 May 1846. Speeches, Letters, and Selections from Important Papers. Grahamstown, South Africa: Godlonton and Richards, 1864, 222. Google Books.

Cumming, R. Gordon. A Hunter’s Life in South Africa, vol. 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1850, 47–48. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. Oxford University Press, 1996, s.v. trek, n.

Harris, Harry. “AFTRA Strike Riles Viewer.” Philadelphia Inquirer (Pennsylvania), 5 April 1967, 17/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, s.v. trekker, n. (21 November 2023), trekkie, n. (27 November 2023).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. trek, n., trek, v., trekkie, n., addition 2019, s.v. trekker, n.

Philipps, Thomas. Philipps, 1820 Settler: His Letters. Arthur Keppel-Jones, ed. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1960, 74.

Pruitt, Carol. Deck 6, #8, May 1970. Fanlore.org.

TV Guide, 22 February 1967, A-72. Archive.org.

Photo credit: Pat Loika, 2013. Flickr.com. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

nova / supernova

Supernova SN 2023IXF in the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), 25 May 2023

2 September 2024

Today, novas and supernovas (or supernovae) are considered to be distinct phenomenon. But prior to the 1930s, the term nova was applied to both. In current usage, a nova occurs in binary star systems consisting of a white dwarf star and a larger star where the white dwarf is accreting material, mostly hydrogen, from its larger companion. When the white dwarf reaches a critical mass, it blows off the excess material in a violent explosion. When this results in the destruction of the white dwarf, it is classified as a Type 1a supermova.

A regular supernova, on the other hand, is the last stage in the life of massive star. When the star is no longer able to sustain a fusion reaction sufficient to counteract its own gravity, it implodes. This gravitational collapse triggers a sudden outburst of fusion reactions that result in a tremendous explosion, destroying the star.

The term nova is from the Latin meaning new because either of these two phenomena appear, from the perspective of an observer on earth, to be a new star.

The coining of nova to refer to an exploding star is often credited to the astronomer Tycho Brahe, but this is not quite correct. Brahe was one of many around the world who observed what we now know to have been a Type 1a supernova in the constellation of Cassiopeia in the year 1572 (SN 1572). Many commentaries and histories conflate two different texts by Brahe. The following year, Brahe published his observations in a text titled is De nova et nullius ævi memoria prius visa stella (Concerning the New, and Never Before Seen in the Memory of Anyone, Star). Many commentaries refer to this 1573 text as De stella nova (Concerning the New Star), but this is not Brahe’s original title and the phrase stella nova does not appear in Brahe’s 1573 text.

But as a coda to Brahe’s text, the 1573 publication includes a poem by Brahe’s friend Anders Sørensen Vedel that does use the phrase:

IN MATHEMATICAM
NOVAE STELLAE CONTEMPLATI
onem, factam a Iuuene Nobilium Doctissimo & Doctorum Nobilissimo, Thycone Brahe Otthonide.

Coellorum illustre augmentum, NOVA STELLA, quid affert?

[…]

Exite, exite, Aegyptum, Babylona, Sodmam;
Promittat CANAAN, haec noua Stella, nouam.

(WITH MATHEMATICS
NEW STARS OBSERVED
One, made by the Younger of the Most Noble Scholars and the Most Noble of Doctors, Tycho Brahe.

The glorious increase of the heavens, the NEW STAR, what does it bring?

[…]

Escape, escape, Egypt, Babylon, Sodom;
It promises CANAAN, this new Star, a new one.)

Brahe, however, would pen another treatise on the celestial event, which would be posthumously published in 1602 under the title De stella nova, as the first volume (actually published second) of his Astronomiae instauratae progymnasmata, and Brahe does use the phrase stella nova in this later text.

So while Brahe did not coin the phrase, at least in publication, the association of stella nova with him is appropriate.

By the early nineteenth century, astronomers writing in English would be using nova to designate observations of a previously unrecorded celestial object, not limited to exploding stars. Beginning in 1824, astronomers John Herschel, the son of astronomer William Herschel, and James South would start using the designation nova in their observations published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

And we see the noun nova applied to exploding stars by the end of that century. An article in the St. Louis Republic of 17 January 1899 that includes this description of looking through the thirty-six-inch refractor telescope at Lick Observatory in California:

The nebula in Orion was another object of great interest, but it baffles all description. The six stars of the Trapezium were separated, and the “Nova,” Alvan Clark’s star, was barely visible.

Astronomers Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky coined the term supernova in lectures at Caltech in 1931. Zwicky would go on to use super-novae at a meeting of the American Physical Society in December 1933, and this use would be picked up by newspapers. From an International News Service article of 9 December 1933:

Strange temporary stars known as “Super-Novae,” composed entirely of neutrons occur in the earth’s star system about once every 1,000 years, producing the cosmic rays, he said. The stars are seen only when they explode, Dr. Zwicky declared.

The phrase “earth’s star system” probably refers to our galaxy, the Milky Way. And astronomers now estimate that a supernova appears in our galaxy every century or so. We haven’t seen one in our galaxy since 1604, which means either that we’re overdue for one or that others have occurred on the other side of the galactic center from Earth, where they have been obscured from our view by intervening dust.

Astronomer Knut Lundmark was another early user of the term supernova and may have independently coined it. He used it in an article written in 1932 and published the following year.

Earlier terms to describe the phenomenon were giant nova, exceptional nova, and the German Hauptnova (main nova). But these did not catch on.

The verb phrases to go nova and to go supernova have their origins in science fiction. In the February 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, editor John W. Campbell wrote:

We’ve considered what might happen if Sol itself went nova. If it should go supernova, no worse could happen; Earth and all life on it would be fused and volatilized in either case.

But there is a very different kind of nova with a very different origin. Nova, a description and term for smoked salmon, often in the form nova lox, appears by 1955. This sense is a clipping of Nova Scotia, through which much of the product was once imported into the United States and assumed to be its origin.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Evening Star (Washington, DC), 30 November 1955, A-44/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Brahe, Tycho. Astronomiae instauratæ progymnasmata. Uraniborg, Denmark: 1602. ProQuest Early European Books.

Campbell, John W. “Supernova Centaurus.” Astounding Science Fiction, 28.6, February 1942, n.p. Archive.org.

Herschel, John Frederick and James South. “Observations of the Apparent Distances and Positions of 380 Double and Triple Stars, Made in the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823” (15 January 1824). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, part 3. London: W. Nicol, 1824, 82. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 11 Marcy 2021, s.v. nova, n.

International News Service. “Star Explosions Form Cosmic Rays, Scientist Asserts.” Denver Post (Colorado), 9 December 1933, 6/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Osterbrock, D. E. “Who Really Coined the Word Supernova? Who First Predicted Neutron Stars?” (conference presentation). 199th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, 6–10 January 2002. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 33, 1330–31. SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2003, s.v. nova, n.1, nova, n.2; June 2012, s.v. supernova, n.

Vedel, Anders Sørensen (Andreas Velleius). “In mathematicam novae stellae contemplati.” In Brahe, Tycho. De nova et nullius ævi memoria prius visa stella. Copenhagen: 1573. ProQuest: Early European Books.

“Vulcan No Myth. That Intermercurial Planet Seen by Prof. Pritchett.” St. Louis Republic (Missouri), 17 January 1899, 3/3–4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2023, licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

sulfur

Clouds of sulfur in a portion of the North America Nebula (NGC 7000) in the constellation Cygnus

30 August 2024

Sulfur is a chemical element with atomic number 16 and the symbol S. It is a yellow, crystalline solid at room temperature. By mass, it is the tenth most abundant element in the universe and the fifth most abundant on earth. It has been known since antiquity but only recognized as an element with advent of modern chemistry in the late eighteenth century. It has a wide variety of commercial applications, including in making matches, gunpowder fertilizer, fungicides and pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and as a precursor for other chemicals.

The word is borrowed into English from French, specifically the Anglo-Norman sulfre, which in turn comes from the Latin sulfur. It is recorded in Anglo-Norman texts from the early twelfth century.

Sulfur makes its English-language appearance by the end of the fourteenth century. Here is a passage from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, written prior to 1393, in which Medea is casting a spell upon Jason’s father Aeson:

Tho lay ther certein wode cleft,
Of which the pieces nou and eft
Sche made hem in the pettes wete,
And put hem in the fyri hete,
And tok the brond with al the blase,
And thries sche began to rase
Aboute Eson, ther as he slepte;
And eft with water, which sche kepte,
Sche made a cercle aboute him thries,
And eft with fyr of sulphre twyes.

(Then lay there certain hewn wood,
Of which the pieces now and again
She placed them in the wet pits,
And put them in the hot fire.
And took the brand with all its blaze,
And thrice she began to run
Around Aeson, there as he slept;
And also with water, which she had kept,
She made a circle about him thrice,
And also with fire of sulfur twice.)

The spellings sulfur and sulphur have coexisted since the word appeared in Middle English, with sulphur being the more common spelling for most of the word’s history. The distinction is often thought to be a difference in American and British spelling, but that geographic distinction is quite recent. Sulfur only became the dominant U.S. spelling c. 1940. In 1990, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) adopted the sulfur spelling as the official one, and British research publications quickly began to adopt that spelling as well. The sulfur spelling eclipsed the sulphur one in British English c. 2015.

Timeline of American spelling of sulfur / sulphur

Timeline of British spelling of sulfur / sulphur

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2021, s.v. sulfre, n.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. In Confessio Amantis, Volume 3, Russell A. Peck ed. and Andrew Galloway, trans. lines 5:4085–94. TEAMS Middle English Texts.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. sulphur, n.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sulfur | sulphur, n.

Image credits: NGC 7000, David Wilton, 2024, licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License; Google Books Ngram Viewer, 28 July 2024, American spelling, British spelling.