Meaning

noun a radioactive transuranic metallic element; produced by bombarding plutonium with helium nuclei

originFrom Curie + -ium (suffix forming names of metallic elements), coined by the American scientists Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–1999), Ralph A. James (1920–1973), and Albert Ghiorso (1915–2010), who synthesized the element in 1944 and named it in honour of Pierre Curie (1859–1906) and Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867–1934) who, with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0