How are the chemical symbols of an element created?

Answer 1

Element names come from a variety of sources. * Some of them are traditional names (silver, gold, sulfur) predating the modern notion of elements. * Some of them are named after their properties (oxygen comes from a phrase meaning "acid former" since it is present in many mineral (and all organic) acids; caesium comes from a word meaning "sky blue" for the color of a line in its emission spectrum). * Some of them are named after the material or location where they were first discovered (helium comes from a word meaning "sun" since it was first discovered by its emission lines in the solar spectrum; samarium comes from the mineral samarskite, from which it was first isolated. * The most recent trend is to name them after scientists (einsteinium, curium, seaborgium). Element symbols are usually abbreviations of the name in some sense. The basic rules are "no repeats, no more than two letters, first letter capitalized, second letter (if there is one) lower case" and beyond that it's pretty much anything goes. The abbreviation may not be related to the name of the element in English; for several elements it comes from the Latin name and in at least one case (tungsten) the abbreviation comes from the German form of the name: W, for wolfram. For elements that have not yet been discovered and/or given official names, there are placeholder names and symbols based on the digits in the atomic number. The digits zero through nine are represented by nil, un, bi, tri, quad, pent, hex, sept, oct, en and the (three-letter) abbreviation is the first letter of each digit. In this scheme, element 118 is ununoctium with symbol Uuo.

Answer 2

There isn't a specific rule for all elements, although the chemical symbols for some elements come from the old latin names, for example, copper is Cu because the old latin word for copper is cupric.