How did zinc get its name?
Paracelsus (1616) was credited with the name “zinc”. Postlewayt’s Universal Dictionary, the most authentic source of all technological information in Europe, did not mention zinc before 1751. The metal did not even have a universally accepted name before the eighteenth century. tutenag or tutanego, derived from the Persian tutiya, calamine [ZnCO3], which became the English tutty, zinc oxide. The Person word tutiya is derived from a word that means smoke. It refers to the fact that zinc oxide is evolved as white smoke when zinc ores are roasted with charcoal. spelter (referring indiscriminately to Zinc and Bismuth), likely from the similar coloured lead-tin alloy, pewter, or the Dutch equivalent, spiauter or Indian tin. The British chemist Robert Boyle latinised this in 1690 to speltrum from which originates spelter, the commercial term for zinc. The term zink was first used by by Paracelsus (c. 1526) in analogy of the form of its crystals after smelting. The word was subsequently used
