About
The character 氪 is a modern phono-semantic compound created for chemical nomenclature to represent the noble gas krypton. It uses the gas radical 气 (qì) as its semantic component, indicating a gaseous element, which is standard for such characters. The inner component 克 (kè), meaning to overcome or a gram, provides the phonetic element, approximating the English "krypton" or its Greek root "kryptos". Coined by chemical translators in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century to standardize scientific terminology, this character has no classical etymology or historical usage outside of chemistry.