User:BirdCorner/sandbox

Introduction
Hi there... Uh, well, you're probably here because the majority of the Wikipedia pages are too fancy for your current intellect. Don't let that get you down though, that's the exact reason why I'm writing this guide. It's for people like us who don't understand and/or bother pouring through pages of professional work. (Although the amount of work put on some pages is IMPRESSIVE. HOLY COW) So without further ado, let's get on with the Periodic Table.

Periodic Table Overview
Now because of Copyright, I can't whip out an image for you right on this website. So, there's some work for you to do. I know, I know, it'll be really hard. Sorry about that. Anyways, grab a picture or a piece of art of the Periodic Table. If you don't have any images, refer to my favourite website for an interactive Periodic Table: Ptable! The link is given at the beginning of this paragraph where that awkward [1] is.

Since you're here, I'm assuming you found the Periodic Table you will refer to for the majority of this page. First of all, get a good look at it. What do you see? I would assume you see a bunch of boxes with some names of elements you've barely heard of in a seemingly random arrangement. Well, let me be one of the many people to tell you that the organization of the Periodic Table is NEVER random. It is very intentional. Otherwise why would I be dedicating a page to it?

What's in the box?!
Welcome to a little round of... drum roll please... What's In The Box? Now, name a few things you see in a box of the Periodic Table!

- One/Two/Three big letters right in the middle

- A smaller number in the top left corner

- A looooong complex name

- (possibly) a bunch of different colors that have to mean something... right?

- A decimal number or (a number in brackets, kinda like it's a secret. Woah, fancy)

- (possibly) a vertical column of integers such as 2+

- (possibly) a vertical column of just... numbers. Not even integers.

The things you see in your copy of the Periodic Table vary quite a bit. I don't know about you, but I personally love the tables with ALL the info at my disposal. Now, we're done playing What's In The Box. Now it's time to further unwrap and flesh out what each item in the box truly means to you and what you can use that information for.

The Big Letters in the Centre
We'll first look at the obvious: those fat letters in the centre. As an example, hydrogen will be our main focus. Don't know where hydrogen is? Look at the TOP, then move your eyes to the LEFT. Boom! The element that's the top/left-most is the FIRST element, hydrogen. So what's hydrogen's big letter? Well, it's a big fat H. Those big fat letters are called symbols. As you can tell, symbols are usually directly derived from the name of the element, like in the H for Hydrogen or the He for Helium (element #2) since H was already taken up by hydrogen. But some letters like the letter K does not belong to an element that has the letter in it, but rather, a completely unrelated one! Like the letter K is the symbol for Potassium. My mind was like, "What the HECK?!" when I first found this.

A lot of the elements actually came from Latin words. Let's take hydrogen as an example again. It came from the Latin words "hydros genes" which means "water forming". Take out an "e" and two of the letter "s" and you get the name hydrogen. Now let's take that weird Potassium element and get its Latin origin word. Turn out, its Latin word is "kalium" which is Latin for "potash". Potash is basically a salt that contains Potassium. But what's fascinating about the Latin word Kalium is that it has a K which turns out to be exactly the weird out-of-place symbol K that's in the Potassium box. A final example is the Fe symbol for the element Iron (element #26). Iron in Latin is actually "ferrum". That's where the Fe symbol comes from. So moral of this paragraph is, if you ever find a weird symbol that doesn't seem to match up, chances are, it matches up in Latin, but not in English.

Here's a nice table filled with common elements and their respective Latin roots.

Atomic Number
Remember that small number up in the top left corner of each box? That's called the atomic number. The atomic number basically represents the number of protons in the atom. If there's one proton, the atom is hydrogen and the atomic number is 1. 100 protons? The element is then Fermium and therefore the atomic number is 100. Atomic number cannot tell you the number of electrons or neutrons in the atom. It can tell you the whereabouts, since there's definitely not 50 neutrons in a hydrogen atom, but it cannot tell you exactly how many. The number of electrons and neutrons are determined through other ways which we will cover when we know more parts of the Periodic Table so stay prepared for that ;).

Colors, fancy!
Now, depending on your Periodic Table, it will be divided into different sections. Since I'm assuming most of you were too lazy to grab your own physical Periodic Table and just used the link I gave you, I'll use that. There are nine different colors.