Talk:Nuclide

Vast international conspiracy to suppress "Nucleide"

I would have sworn that the word was "nucleide," derived from "nucleus." Goes to show about swearing. If that is truly an error on my part, rather than a spelling variant, it seems to be common, redirects to "nuclide" are common. For example, there is a web site, operated by a national lab, nucleide.org. But on the site itself, the word is spelled "nuclide."

"Nuclide" really sounds wrong to me, and I've been using the word for more than 50 years. Obviously there is a vast international conspiracy to suppress "nucleide."

What I was able to find was that "nucleide" may have a different meaning, examples of usage involved a silver salt that probably was so named because it formed "nuclei" of chemical growth. These were all very old sources, like a hundred years old. I could find no definition of "nucleide" anywhere.

[1] Lovely. Claims that "nucleide" is the correct spelling, but gives no definition or usage example. Automatically prepared, probably, from what?

Anyone have access to the OED?

Found usages of "nucleide,"[2], so I don't feel quite so crazy. The really old usages (c. 1900) are with a different meaning, I speculate above. Isotopes were not suggested, according to Wikipedia, until 1912. --Abd (talk) 18:15, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

My speculation was wrong. The old meaning of "nucleide" is a compound of "nuclein" with a metal oxide. "Nuclein" appears to be an old name for nucleic acid, named after being found in cell nuclei, best known example, DNA. --Abd (talk) 02:21, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

A little bit of nitpciking

A nuclide isn't an atom. It's just the nucleus. An atom is the nucleus plus all the electrons required to make it charge-neutral. That's about all I remember from my three months doing theoretical nuclear physics research in college. Well, that, and that I hate programming in fortran. Mcnamara12 (talk) 14:22, 15 August 2012 (UTC)