Random Element Generator

The list is the periodic table, so it is fixed and complete. There are 118 confirmed elements. The last four — nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson — were named in 2016, and nothing has been added since. This is not a list we curated: an element is on it if it has been confirmed and named, and there is no judgement call to make.

Only two elements are liquid at room temperature. Mercury and bromine. Eleven are gases — hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, chlorine and the six noble gases. Everything else is solid, including gallium, caesium and rubidium, which melt in your hand but are solid at 20 °C.

Ninety elements occur in nature, and six of those barely do. Technetium, promethium, astatine, francium, neptunium and plutonium are found in nature only in vanishing traces, mostly in uranium ores, so they are marked separately. Everything from americium (95) upward has only ever existed because someone made it.

Above element 99 the properties are calculated, not measured. Some of these elements have only ever existed as a few atoms, for fractions of a second. Where nobody has ever had enough of a substance to see what state it is in, the phase column says unknown rather than repeating a theoretical prediction as though it were a measurement.

The family boundaries are conventions and a few are argued over. Whether zinc, cadmium and mercury count as transition metals depends on which definition you use; polonium and astatine sit on the metal–nonmetal line and different tables place them differently. The families given here are the ones used in the common printed periodic table.