An Adventure In Mineral Names (Maybe They do Mean Something Afterall...)

     Let’s be honest, there are a lot of mineral names out there that just don’t make sense. Sometimes it seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to them and that the scientists just wanted to make up the goofiest names possible! Actually the minerals’ names (even the odd ones) do have some meaning behind them. That is what I’d like to explore today.
     Minerals are usually named for something. After all, it is much easier to base a name on something than to simply invent one out of thin air. A lot of minerals are given a name that describes something about them in another language, Latin and Greek being the popular languages to use for this purpose. For example: the mineral scolecite gets its name from the Greek word skolex, which means worm. Scolecite was given this name because it has a tendency to curl like a worm when it’s heated or dehydrated. The second most popular thing to name a mineral after is the proper name of a person or place like ulexite (which is named for the German scientist George L. Ulex) and aragonite (which is named for Aragon, Spain.) Some minerals are named for the elements that make them up like molybdenite and vanadanite, which are named for the elements molybdenum and vanadium respectively, but these sort of names are rare in the mineral world.
     What about the “normal” mineral names? It would appear that most of these minerals were discovered before modern science came about and that the names are simply ancient words for the stones.
     I hope that you’ve had fun learning about the origins of mineral names and I hope that these names don’t seem quite so strange now!