potassium
noun
Simple meaning
A soft, waxy, silvery reactive metal that is never found unbound in nature.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
puhtaseeuhmSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
pəˈtæsiəm
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
A soft, waxy, silvery reactive metal that is never found unbound in nature; an element with atomic number 19 and atomic weight of 39.0983.
countable
A single atom of this element.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- General and technical use
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A soft, waxy, silvery reactive metal that is never found unbound in nature; an element with atomic number 19 and atomic weight of 39.0983.
Used this way, potassium is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a scientific use: it names something precisely within a field of study, so it appears in research and teaching more than in conversation.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Science
- Academic writing
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
A crystalline salt (KHCO3) that is used in baking powder and as an antacid.
A white crystalline double sulfate of aluminum: the potassium double sulfate of aluminum.
Geological dating that relies on the proportions of radioactive potassium in a rock sample and its decay product, argon.
A crystalline salt (KHCO3) that is used in baking powder and as an antacid.
A salt used especially in baking powder.
A white crystalline salt (KBr) used as a sedative and in photography.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.