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Natron"), stemming from Wadi Natrun (HWB p.445). Sm' ("southern natron"), stemming from el-Kab, and nTrj mHw ("northern

Herodotus II, 86-87, where the form litron The following explanation comes from Egyptian loan-words in English:ĭerives via French and Spanish from Arabic natrun or nitrun, whichĭerives from Greek nitron (= "soda") (e.g. But within a year Berzelius decided in favor of Kalium and Natrium (he seems to be the first to use this shortened form of Natronium).ĭespite this, as the list of names in different languages to the left shows, the English and French speaking countries followed Davy and Gay-Lussac/Thénard with Sodium and Potassium, and the Germanic countries adopted Gilbert/Klaproth's names Natrium and Kalium. In this first paper he followed the British discoverer Davy nomenclature and abbreviated Potassium and Sodium as Po and So. In 1813 Berzelius published in a British journal, Thomas Thomson's Annals of Philosophy, his system of atomic symbols as one- or two-letter abbreviations of Latin names for the elements. In 1808 Gehlen suggested Kalin(um) and Natrin or Natrinmetall. Gilbert obviously followed the 1797 proposal by Klaproth. These names I will use throughout this article. Translation: The reader will remember from these Annalen that Davy named these bodies Potassium, which I replaced by Kalium, just as Davy's name for the Natron-Metal, Sodium, is represented by Natronium, in agreement with the German nomenclature. However, a note in a translation of a later article by Davy (note) makes clear what Gilbert's idea of a translation was: 1 of the new series) is not available in the Bibliotheca Gallica (it would be interesting to see how Gilbert translated the naming paragraph quoted above). I have not seen Gilbert's translation of Davy's article yet, since vol. Many articles were translated by Gilbert himself, he calls his work a "free translation" since he added his own comments. The results of Davy's research were made public in German by Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert in his Annalen der Physik of 1809 (vol. Gay-Lussac and Thénard, who too investigated the alkalis, named the metals initially métal de potasse and métal de soude, and later also Potassium and Sodium. The rather elaborate explanation of this choice for the two names suggests that Davy new that chemists in Germanic Europe had other ideas of naming the alkali metals. But it was not possible to found names upon specific properties not common to both and though a name for the basis of soda might have been borrowed from the Greek, yet an analogous one could not have been applied to that of potash, for the ancients do not seem to have distinguished between the two alkalies." It is perhaps more significant than elegant. I have consulted with many of the most eminent scientific persons in this country, upon the methods of derivation, and the one I have adopted as been the one most generally approved. Potassium and Sodium are the names by which I have ventured to call the two new substances: and whatever changes of theory, with regard to the composition of bodies may hereafter take place, these terms can scarcely express an error for they may be considered as implying simply the metals produced from potash and soda. Not satisfied with these names, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, suggested in his paper for the Royal Academy of Berlin of 26 January 1797, the name kali for potash and natron for soda (note):

These names were not generally accepted, and chemists used soda and potash for both substances. In his "Démonstration de la possibilité de tirer les sels alcalis fixes du tartre, par le moyen des acides, sans employer l'action d'un feu véhément" (note) he named them alcali minerale (mineral alkali or soda) and alcali vegetabile (vegetable alkali or potash). The difference between both substances was recognized by Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709-1782) in 1758, among other he described the different colorations potash and soda produce in flame. The modern spelling of the element in Arabic uses the emphatic S (shown uppercase in transliteration) from the original Arabic word. This word is derived from Arabic Sudâ (soda). The name soda is a derivation from "sodanum", a Neolatin name for a headache remedy. In Arab, the same substances were named alkali (see Potassium / Kalium.) Derived from these is the word natron, the name used by the European alchemists for potash and soda.

There was made no difference between both substances, which were named by the Israelites neter, by the Greek νιτρον (nitron) and by the Romans nitrum (cf. Soda (Sodium carbonate, Na 2CO 3) from the Egyptian salt lakes, and Potash (Potassium carbonate, K 2CO 3), obtained from the ashes of plant material, were known since Antiquity and used for washing.