The Periodic Table Explained: How to Memorize It (Plus the Race for Element 119) 🧪

① What Is the Periodic Table? A Russian Chemist's Bold Gamble

Long before Mendeleev, chemists had already been circling the idea. In 1817, German chemist Johann Döbereiner noticed that elements like lithium, sodium, and potassium could be grouped into "triads," where the atomic weight of the middle element was roughly the average of the other two. In 1862, French geologist Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois arranged elements along a spiral, showing that properties repeated periodically — but his diagram was so complicated that almost nobody paid attention.

Then, in 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev wrote each of the 63 known elements on its own card and laid them out in order of atomic weight. Shuffling the cards like a game of solitaire, he noticed that similar properties kept reappearing at regular intervals. Here's the bold part: wherever the pattern didn't fit, he simply left a blank space and declared, with total confidence, that an undiscovered element belonged there.

That prediction turned out to be eerily accurate. The gap Mendeleev called "eka-aluminium," complete with predicted density and melting point, was filled a few years later by the discovery of gallium. "Eka-silicon" turned out to be germanium, and "eka-boron" turned out to be scandium — matching his predictions closely enough that even skeptical chemists had to admit the table was onto something real.

Mendeleev wasn't alone in circling this idea. English chemist John Newlands published his "Law of Octaves" in 1865, noting that properties repeated every eight elements. He was mocked at the time — one critic reportedly asked if he planned to "play music" with the elements next — and Newlands, discouraged, largely stepped back from the field. Twenty-two years later, once Mendeleev's table had been formally recognized, the Chemical Society of London invited Newlands back and honored his early insight. Mendeleev himself was reportedly a strong contender for the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, losing by a single vote.

The table took a few more rounds of revision to reach its modern form. In 1913, physicist Henry Moseley used X-ray experiments to show that elements should be ordered by atomic number — the number of protons in the nucleus — rather than atomic weight, and that's still the ordering principle used today. Moseley never received a Nobel Prize for this work; he was killed in action during World War I. Then in 1945, American chemist Glenn Seaborg showed that the lanthanides and actinides belonged in two separate rows at the bottom of the table, giving us the shape we recognize on classroom walls today. In other words, the periodic table isn't the product of a single genius — it's a relay race that's been running for more than 150 years. Mendeleev himself was later honored posthumously with element 101, mendelevium.

Marie Curie deserves a mention too. In 1898, working with her husband Pierre, she spent years refining uranium ore and eventually isolated two brand-new elements: polonium and radium. Polonium was named after her homeland, Poland — making it one of the first elements named after a country rather than a person. The work earned her the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics and, in 1911, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, making her the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Seaborg himself is worth a second look, too. Beyond rearranging the table's bottom rows, he personally discovered or co-discovered nearly ten new elements, including plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, and californium. In 1997, while Seaborg was still alive, element 106 was officially named seaborgium in his honor — putting him in the very small club of scientists who got to see their own name on the periodic table while they were still around to appreciate it.

② How to Actually Read the Periodic Table

The table feels intimidating mostly because people try to read it as a grid of random symbols. In reality, every row and column carries specific meaning. Rows are called "periods," and elements in the same period share the same number of electron shells — period 1 elements have one shell, period 7 elements have seven. Columns are called "groups," and elements in the same group share the same number of valence (outermost) electrons, which is why they behave similarly.

Color-coding makes this even more intuitive. Here's the basic classification system used throughout this guide.

Since we're already talking electrons: most elements try to fill their outermost shell with eight electrons — the "octet rule." That's exactly why noble gases barely react with anything; their outer shell is already full (or, in helium's case, holds a stable two). Group 1 elements, on the other hand, need to gain or lose just one electron to reach that same stable state, which is exactly why they're so explosively reactive.

There's also a broader trend worth knowing: moving left to right across a period, metallic character decreases and nonmetallic character increases; moving top to bottom within a group, atomic size and metallic character both increase. Once you understand the table this way, you can often predict how an element will behave just from its position. The table is also divided into "blocks" based on which electron orbital is being filled — groups 1–2 form the s-block, the transition metals form the d-block, groups 13–18 form the p-block, and the lanthanides/actinides form the f-block. That's a college-chemistry-level detail, so for now it's enough to just know it exists.

③ Elements All Around You: Everyday Uses

Part of why the periodic table feels abstract is that nobody explains what it's actually for. In reality, you brush up against a dozen of these elements before lunch. Here are a few familiar examples that make the table feel a lot less theoretical.

Once you connect elements to physical objects like this, the periodic table stops looking like a list to memorize for a test and starts looking like a materials catalog for everything you own. Next, let's put that connection to work with some memorization strategies.

④ A Realistic Way to Memorize the Periodic Table

Trying to memorize all 118 elements in one sitting is a great way to give up by lunchtime. The advice that shows up again and again across chemistry forums and study communities is refreshingly simple: understand the pattern, break it into small chunks, and repeat. Here's a step-by-step version of that advice.

1. 1
   Master elements 1–20 first

   Don't try to learn all 118 at once. Hydrogen through calcium covers the elements you'll actually encounter most often in class and in daily life.

2. 2
   Chunk it into groups of 4–5 and give it rhythm

   Instead of memorizing a whole row at once, break it into short chunks — "H-He-Li-Be, B-C-N-O-F-Ne" — and it starts to feel like song lyrics rather than a list.

3. 3
   Write it by hand and say it out loud

   Writing the symbol while saying the element name out loud engages more of your memory than passive reading — a point that comes up constantly in study advice.

4. 4
   Anchor elements to real objects

   As covered above — lithium is your phone battery, neon is a street sign, titanium is a dental implant. Concrete images stick far better than abstract symbols.

5. 5
   Turn it into a game

   Quiz-style study apps turn tedious memorization into something closer to a five-minute game, which lowers the barrier to actually repeating the material.

6. 6
   Do a little, often

   A poster taped above your desk and four or five new elements a day beats a single marathon cramming session for long-term retention.

Interestingly, the lanthanides and actinides at the bottom of the table look intimidating but are often easier to remember than you'd expect. Many are named after planets (uranium, neptunium, plutonium), famous scientists (einsteinium, mendelevium), or the places where they were discovered (californium, americium) — which makes them feel more like a story than a string of syllables. The transition metals in groups 3–12, on the other hand, tend to trip people up the most, since their names and colors can blur together. Anchoring yourself to familiar ones — iron, copper, zinc, silver, gold — first, then filling in around them, tends to help.

Different Approaches for Different Stages

How you approach the table should shift depending on your level. Younger students benefit more from coloring activities and card games than rote memorization. Middle schoolers should focus on accurately matching elements 1–20 to their symbols, along with a basic sense of the difference between atomic number and atomic mass.

For high schoolers heading into more rigorous chemistry coursework, memorization alone isn't enough — you need to connect the table to moles, electron configuration, and ionization trends. At that stage, the real skill isn't knowing "element 26 is iron," it's being able to look at the table and reason out why an element behaves the way it does. As you advance, the goal quietly shifts from recall to explanation.

⑤ Right Now: The International Race for Element 119

This is where things get genuinely exciting. The periodic table most of us learned in school ends at element 118, oganesson, completing seven full periods. But right now, nuclear physics labs around the world are racing to synthesize element 119 — the element that would open an entirely new eighth period. Since it hasn't been officially discovered yet, it goes by the IUPAC placeholder name "ununennium," with the temporary symbol Uue.

Creating a superheavy element is often compared to winning the lottery. Two heavy atomic nuclei have to be fused together by smashing them together in a particle accelerator, but the more protons involved, the stronger the electrical repulsion pushing them apart — so the odds of a successful fusion drop dramatically as elements get heavier. Research teams routinely run trillions of collisions just to detect a handful of atoms, which gives you a sense of how hard-won every box past element 118 really is.

Despite the odds, researchers keep at it because of a compelling theory called the "island of stability." The idea is that certain combinations of protons and neutrons could produce superheavy elements that are, counterintuitively, more stable and longer-lived than their lighter superheavy neighbors. Recent experimental data has offered some support for this theory, raising hopes that discovering elements 119 and 120 could do more than fill in a blank box — it could reveal something fundamental about how matter holds together.

Interestingly, South Korea has entered this race too. IBS's heavy-ion accelerator RAON, built in Daejeon's Sindong district, is a home-grown facility often nicknamed "the biggest basic-science project in Korean history." Alongside its work on rare isotopes, discovering new superheavy elements is one of its stated research goals — and IBS has floated the idea that if RAON does discover a new element, it would be named "koreanium" (symbol Ko), a detail that's become a minor point of national pride in Korean science circles.

As of 2026, Russia's JINR team is running experiments with new target materials and beams, while Japan's RIKEN continues its search using an upgraded separator system. If either team — or any of the others — succeeds, it would mark the first new element name added to the periodic table in roughly a decade, following the naming of nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson back in 2016. It's worth noting that detecting a new element doesn't mean it's instantly official: the claim has to pass joint verification by IUPAC and IUPAP before the discovering team can even propose a name, a process that can take anywhere from a few years to over a decade.

⑥ Fun Facts You Can Casually Drop in Conversation

None of these will show up on a test, but they're the kind of periodic table trivia that makes for surprisingly good conversation.

⑦ Frequently Asked Questions

⑧ How the Internet Feels About the Periodic Table

Public reaction to the periodic table tends to split into two very different camps. Around exam season, student communities fill up with posts along the lines of "when am I ever going to finish memorizing this," and self-deprecating "I gave up on chemistry" jokes circulate as a kind of shared coping mechanism. On the flip side, science YouTube videos that dig into the backstory of individual elements — or set them to a catchy memorization song — reliably draw comments like "I would've actually liked chemistry if it was taught this way."

The common thread seems to be that the problem was never the table itself — it was the delivery. Once you know the discovery stories and the human drama behind those 118 stiff little symbols, they start to feel a lot more like old friends than obstacles. Hopefully this guide did a little of that for you, too.