A Latin Name for Stockholm

Holmium's name is a scholarly Latinism honouring Stockholm, the Swedish capital near which the Ytterby quarry lies and where much of the rare-earth work was done. It joins the geographical namings that cluster around the discovery of the lanthanides, most of them Scandinavian, reflecting the Swedish and Nordic chemists who dominated the field. Cleve, who named holmium, drew two elements from the same work, naming the other thulium after Thule, the classical name for the far north. Holmium has no mythological or alchemical past, being a product of nineteenth-century spectroscopy and fractional separation; its name simply plants the flag of Stockholm in the periodic table, a companion to the nearby village of Ytterby that named so many of its neighbours.

Priority for holmium is genuinely shared rather than settled on one name: Delafontaine and Soret observed its distinctive spectral absorption bands first, while Cleve, working independently and apparently unaware of their spectroscopic work, isolated the actual substance and supplied the name that was ultimately adopted, so modern references typically credit the discovery to all three. Cleve's naming choice for holmium came in the same short burst of productivity that also gave the periodic table thulium, a remarkable pace even by the standards of the crowded rare-earth decade of the 1870s.