Tungsten carries two names and, in the older one, a scrap of folklore. Wolfram, the source of the symbol W, derives from the German for wolf's froth or wolf's cream, a name medieval tin-smelters gave to the troublesome ore wolframite because it interfered with the smelting of tin, seeming to devour the tin ore as a wolf devours sheep, leaving a frothy slag. The metal itself has no planetary or alchemical station, being an eighteenth-century discovery, but this metallurgical curse-name preserves the same imaginative habit that gave cobalt its goblin and nickel its devil: the personification of an obstinate ore as a hungry beast. The heavy stone that names it in English marks the density that first set it apart.
In recent decades tungsten carbide has also become a popular material for men's wedding rings, prized for a scratch resistance far exceeding gold or platinum, though the same hardness means such rings, unlike softer metals, cannot be resized and will shatter rather than bend if struck hard enough, a practical trade-off jewellers routinely explain to buyers. The rings owe their dark grey sheen to the same dense, wolf-named ore chemistry that once frustrated medieval tin-smelters.