About
Created for modern scientific nomenclature, 氪 is a phono-semantic compound that represents the noble gas krypton in the periodic table. It combines the gas radical 气 (qì) as the upper, enveloping semantic component, a standard convention for gaseous elements, and the inner component 克 (kè, meaning 'overcome' or 'gram') for its phonetic value, which approximates the first syllable of the English 'krypton' (from Greek kryptos). Artificially coined by chemical translators in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century to standardize Chinese terminology, the character has no classical etymology or literary history outside its scientific use.
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