Element: Four in Ancient Greece, 118 on the Modern Table

An element is a basic component: one of the parts a thing is built from. Greek thinkers counted four — earth, water, air and fire. Chemistry replaced them with substances that cannot be broken down by chemical means, and the periodic table now holds 118 of them. Ordinary English kept the older, looser sense: an element of doubt, the criminal element, the elements of grammar.

• A basic part of something. *An element of risk.*
• A chemical substance of one kind of atom. *Carbon is an element.*
• The elements — the weather, especially bad weather. *Exposed to the elements.*
• A heating coil. *The kettle's element burned out.*

Word forms

How it is used in a sentence

• There is an element of truth in what he says.An element of means some, but not much.
• The climbers were exposed to the elements for two nights.The elements, plural, means the weather.
• Put her in front of a class and she is in her element.From the idea of a creature in its natural surroundings.

Elemental or elementary?

• Elemental — raw and fundamental, often about nature (*elemental fury*)
• Elementary — basic, at the beginner's level (*elementary physics*)
• Element — the part itself
• Compound — two or more elements chemically joined
• Periodic table — the arrangement of the elements by atomic number

From Latin *elementum*, a first principle or rudiment, used in the plural for the letters of the alphabet — the elements from which words are built. English borrowed it in the Middle Ages, when the four classical elements were still the standard account of matter.