uranium

from the suffix -ium denoting a metal and durane (uranium oxide, UO2), itself (1790) from the German uran (1789), identified by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789, in reference to the planet Uranus discovered eight years earlier. The substance obtained by Klaproth's method (urane) was considered elemental until 1841, when the French chemist Eugène-Melchior Péligot isolated the metal.