Radium

Quick meaning: Radium is a noun meaning The chemical element (symbol Ra) with an atomic number of 88. It is a soft, shiny and silvery radioactive alkaline earth metal.

Meaning

The chemical element (symbol Ra) with an atomic number of 88. It is a soft, shiny and silvery radioactive alkaline earth metal.

More Meanings

1. (textiles, dated) A type of cloth woven from silk or synthetic yarn, often with a shiny appearance.
2. (ambitransitive, obsolete) To treat (a tumour, etc.) with radium.

Example Sentences

Well, remember how the children of the State Orphanage became mysteriously ill? The doctors diagnosed it as radium poisoning, but how it happened was a first class mystery to them. There's no radium factory within miles of the orphanage.

Of the total, fifteen cases were treated surgically, seventeen by radium, one by a combination of the two methods, three by radium and X-ray, one by the Percy cautery, two by the cautery, and two by the cautery preceding the application of radium.

As for myself, I had to devote again a great deal of time to the preparation of several decigrammes of very pure radium chloride. With this I achieved, in 1907, a new determination of the atomic weight of radium, and in 1910 I was able to isolate the metal.

As soon as it had been shown that skin burns could be caused by radium, medical men began to experiment in order to find out if malignant growths of the skin could be destroyed by the same agency. [...] Immense strides have been made in the technique of applying the radium to kill cancers.

Word Forms

• radiums
• radiuming
• radiumed

Synonyms for radium

Depending on context, synonyms include radiumize, ra.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include ra, beryllium, diode, intracavitary, radio, radioelement.

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