Silver the periodic table) is useful in nuclear reactors because of its high thermal neutron capture cross-section, good conduction of heat, mechanical stability, and resistance to corrosion in hot water. The word "silver" appears in Anglo-Saxon in various spellings, such as "seolfor" and "siolfor". A similar form is seen throughout the Germanic languages (compare Old High German "silabar" and "silbir"). The chemical symbol Ag is from the Latin word for "silver", "argentum" (compare Ancient Greek ἄργυρος, "árgyros"), from the Proto-Indo-European root *"h₂erǵ-" (formerly reconstructed as "*arǵ-"), meaning "white" or "shining": this was the usual Proto-Indo-European word for the metal, whose reflexes
Silver usually obtained by reacting silver or silver monofluoride with the strongest known oxidizing agent, krypton difluoride. Silver and gold have rather low chemical affinities for oxygen, lower than copper, and it is therefore expected that silver oxides are thermally quite unstable. Soluble silver(I) salts precipitate dark-brown silver(I) oxide, AgO, upon the addition of alkali. (The hydroxide AgOH exists only in solution; otherwise it spontaneously decomposes to the oxide.) Silver(I) oxide is very easily reduced to metallic silver, and decomposes to silver and oxygen above 160 °C. This and other silver(I) compounds may be oxidized by the strong oxidizing agent peroxodisulfate