Scheelites

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Plural form of scheelite, a calcium tungstate mineral that forms in crystals and serves as an important ore of tungsten
2. Several specimens of a pale tungsten-bearing mineral named after the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele and mined for tungsten
3. Crystalline calcium tungstate minerals, the ore-bearing rocks from which metallic tungsten is commonly extracted

Etymology: Scheelite is named after Karl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786), the Swedish-German chemist whose discoveries were so numerous that many chemical substances bear his name or were first isolated by him. Scheele identified the element tungsten in 1781 from the mineral now called scheelite, and the mineral was named in his honour. The name reflects a quirk of chemistry: the ore was known to miners as "tungsten," a Swedish word meaning "heavy stone," and the element took that name, while the mineral itself took his. The word is built simply from Scheele's surname plus the suffix "-ite," a standard ending for minerals, which comes from Greek "lithos" (stone) through the common mineralogical naming convention. "Scheelites" is the plural, used when referring to several specimens or to the group of minerals of this kind.