Potassium Potassium Potassium is a chemical element with symbol K (from Neo-Latin "kalium") and atomic number 19. It was first isolated from potash, the ashes of plants, from which its name derives. In the periodic table, potassium is one of the alkali metals. All of the alkali metals have a single valence electron in the outer electron shell, which is easily removed to create an ion with a positive charge – a cation, which combines with anions to form salts. Potassium in nature occurs only in ionic salts. Elemental potassium is a soft silvery-white alkali metal that oxidizes rapidly in air
Group 12 element It was then officially named by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) after Nicolaus Copernicus on February 19, 2010, the 537th anniversary of Copernicus' birth. Like in most other d-block groups, the abundance in Earth's crust of group 12 elements decreases with higher atomic number. Zinc is with 65 parts per million (ppm) the most abundant in the group while cadmium with 0.1 ppm and mercury with 0.08 ppm are orders of magnitude less abundant. Copernicium, as a synthetic element with a half-life of a few minutes, may only be present in the laboratories where it was