hélium

from English helium, constructed from the ancient Greek ἥλιος, hếlios ('sun'), with the suffix -ium. The word was proposed in 1868 by two Britons, the astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer and the chemist Edward Frankland, after the solar eclipse that allowed the discovery of helium through spectroscopic analysis of the sun's light. The -ium suffix was used on the model of selenium, tellurium.