British Sign Language Glossaries of Curriculum Terms

BSL Chemistry Glossary - chemical symbol - Definition

Chemical symbols are a way of writing out the names of elements in a shortened (abbreviated) way - here are some examples.

We can shorten Helium to 'He' and oxygen to 'O' - in both these examples the first letter is used.

Here's another example - Carbon; what do you think the shortened name/chemical symbol will be? ... It's 'C'.

Nitrogen = 'N'.

What about copper? We already have 'C' for carbon and we can't use 'Co' because that's cobalt ... copper is 'Cu' so that we can distinguish it, it's different from carbon.

The next example is silver, 'S' is already in use for sulfur and 'Si' is silicon; the chemical symbol for silver is 'Ag'.

All of these chemical symbols can be found on the periodic table.