Chalcogenide

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A compound consisting of one or more metals combined with chalcogen elements such as sulfur, selenium, or tellurium ; a category of materials featuring these chalcogen elements bonded with metals forming crystalline or amorphous substances ; substances containing chalcogen elements chemically united with metals, often used in semiconductors and photovoltaic devices
2. Chemical compounds formed by the union of chalcogen atoms and metals ; materials comprising sulfur, selenium, or tellurium combined with metal elements ; substances where chalcogen elements bind with metals resulting in compounds with notable electronic properties
3. Substances made by combining metals with elements from the oxygen family including sulfur and selenium ; materials characterized by metal-chalcogen bonds creating compounds utilized in electronics ; chemical entities composed of chalcogen members and metal atoms forming solid-state compounds with distinctive features

Etymology: Chalcogenide is a modern coinage built from two parts that are both older than the chemistry they describe. The first part, "chalcogen", combines the Greek "khalkos", meaning copper or bronze, with the suffix "-gen", meaning producing or forming. The name refers to the way these elements, sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, are commonly found in copper ores. The second part, "-ide", is the chemist's suffix for a binary compound, and it comes from the Latin "-idus" through French, and in English it marks compounds such as chloride or oxide. Put together, the word simply means a compound of a chalcogen with a metal. Its structure is so plain that it was almost certainly built to fit a family of substances already being studied, rather than inherited from older speech. Because the name follows the usual pattern for naming compounds, a chemist meeting the term can tell at once what elements it involves.