Elementymology & Elements Multidict

memory peg	Bluish-white, brittle metal melting point 420 °C; 787 °F boiling point 907 °C; 1665 °F density 7.13 g/cc; 445.23 pounds/cubic foot
Known to the ancients
Zink(e) = sharp point (German) Named in 1546 by Georgius Agricola, again in 1746 Andreas Marggraf

Centuries before zinc was recognized as a distinct element, zinc ores were used for making brass. Tubal-Cain, seven generations from Adam, is mentioned as being an "instructor in every artificer in brass and iron."

Zinc ornaments with more than 2500 years have been discovered, but should now be considered as alloys since they have composition of only 80 to 90% zinc, with the remainder Lead including Aron and Antimony as impurities.

The reduction of ZnO by charcoal requires a temperature of 1000 °C or more and, because the metal is a vapour at that temperature and is liable to reoxidation, its collection requires some form of condenser and the exclusion of air. This was apparently first achieved in India in the thirteenth century. The art then passed to China where zinc coins were used in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Marco Polo described the manufacture of zinc oxide in Persia and how the Persians prepared tutia (a solution of zinc vitriol) for healing sore eyes (cf. the Georgian name for the metal).
References to Zinc and brass are found in the lost text Philippica or Theopompus (4th century BC), quoted in Strabo's Geography (XIII, 56):

"There is a stone near Andreida (north west Anatolia) which yields Iron when burnt. After being treated in a furnace with a certain earth it yields droplets of false silver. This added to copper, forms the so-called mixture, which some call oreichalkos."

The first slab zinc or spelter was imported from the East by the East-India companies around 1600, late when compared with Iron, Copper or Lead. In 1597, the German Andreas Libavius (1545-1616) received from a friend a "peculiar kind of tin" which was prepared in India. He called it Indian or Malabar lead. He was uncertain what it was, but from his account it is quite clear that that metal was Zinc.

Zinc compounds were know in Europe. Georgius Agricola in 1546 reported that a white metal was condensed and scraped off the walls of the furnace when Rammelsberg ore was smelted in the Harz Mountains to obtain Lead and Silver to which he gave the name contrefey because it was used to imitate Gold. This often consisted to metallic zinc, although he did not recognize it as such. He observed, furthermore, that a similar metal which he called zincum (from antecedents that are not clear) was being produced under similar circumstances in Silesia by the local people. Paracelsus (1493-1541) was the first European to state clearly that zincum was a new metal and that it had properties distinct from other known metals. He regarded it as a bastard or semi-metal. The identification of Zinc as the metal from blende or calamine (Lapis Calaminarus, mineral form of ZnCO₃) was accomplished by Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) in 1695.
João Cardoso writes that the term was first used by a certain Löhneyes in 1697. I have not found any information on this person (the correct orthography is probably (von) Löneysen).

Finally, Andreas Marggraf (1709-1782) isolated Zinc from its minerals. He published his findings in "On the method of extracting zinc from its true mineral, calamine" (1746). The metal was viewed as a complex blende of metals nearly until the time of Antoine Lavoisier's revolutionary listing of Zinc as an element.

The metal did not even have a universally accepted name before the eighteenth century.

• tutenag or tutanego, derived from the Persian tutiya, calamine [ZnCO₃], which became the English tutty, zinc oxide. The Person word tutiya is derived from a word that means smoke. It refers to the fact that zinc oxide is evolved as white smoke when zinc ores are roasted with charcoal.
• spelter (referring indiscriminately to Zinc and Bismuth), likely from the similar coloured lead-tin alloy, pewter, or the Dutch equivalent, spiauter or Indian tin. The British chemist Robert Boyle latinised this in 1690 to speltrum from which originates spelter, the commercial term for zinc.
• The term zink was first used by by Paracelsus (c. 1526) in analogy of the form of its crystals after smelting. The word was subsequently used for both the metal and its ores.

• Greek Ψευδαργυρος [pseudargyros]: literaly "pseudo-silver".
• Georgian თუთია [t'ut'ia]: After the Persian tutia, a solution of zinc vitriol.
• Japanese, the two characters are 亜 = second, and 鉛 = lead.
• In Arabic, خارصين [kharsīn]: > Al-Ghar = mine, + Al-Sīn = China, thus: the metal from Chinese mines.

• Mary Elvira Weeks, Discovery of the Elements, comp. rev. by Henry M. Leicester (Easton, Pa.: Journal of Chemical Education, 1968), pp. 137-147.
• Arun Kumar Biswas, Zinc and related alloys: The pioneering traditions in the ancient ad medieval India (on-line).
• Fathi Habashi, Discovering the 8th metal, A history of Zinc (on-line).
• James B. Calvert, "Zinc and Cadmium" 2002 (on-line).
• T.L. Phipson, "Sur l'existence d'un nouvel élément métallique, l'actinium, dans le zinc du commerce". La Nature: Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l'industrie 9 (1881): 243 (on-line)